A New Chapter

In addition to the indisputable and moving personal highlights the year 2019 brought me, today is certainly one of the most intense and clearly most exciting days for me in 15 years at SAP. However, what really counts are the past 15 years. Looking back, my journey at SAP begun as an apprentice in the dual study track of our company. When I started my career, I could not have imagined becoming the CIO let alone a board member one day.

Having started as a consultant in the CRM space, I then got the chance for a fellowship in Palo Alto. This experience had a huge impact on me since I learnt how to work in a whole ecosystem of innovators – from startups to big companies. My fellowship time taught me so much about cultural flavors, innovation spirit, and life-long learning, because I had to move out of my own comfort zone and adapt to a new environment. Following this experience, I then moved on to work as a board assistant for our former Executive Board member and highly respected member of the Supervisory Board of SAP, Gerd Oswald.

During that time, our former CIO started to move SAP into the mobile era, providing iPhones and iPads to our employees. While this was a great initiative and right on time, I asked myself, what should employees do with the new technology? The devices needed to be enabled by apps and services to truly add value and simplify our colleagues’ lives. And in response, our CIO challenged me, saying “you are using big words, then show big actions and turn your vision into reality for our colleagues”. This is how I landed in IT, starting with responsibility for the Mobile Center of Excellence. Many of you know the rest of the story. After a few years in various roles, I was honored to be appointed as SAP’s CIO in 2016.

What I want to say is, that SAP both challenges people and provides opportunities for personal growth. This is a testament to our corporate culture, allowing talents from our own ranks to grow. In my opinion, SAP is a special workplace in the fast-paced IT industry, providing young talents so many opportunities to grow and to find their individual path. SAP IT is the place where I grew up, and the team will always have a special place in my heart. I’m very grateful that I could be part of this amazing team.

Today, I would like to take the opportunity to also celebrate our SAP Product Engineering teams across the globe. Together, we will continue to work tirelessly to address some of the challenges our customers and we as SAP are currently facing. While we still have a way to go, we receive increasingly positive feedback on our direction as we heard at some of our big events, such as SAPPHIRE, SAP TechEd, the Annual DSAG Congress, or the recent SAP MaxAttention Summit.

Our colleagues in SAP Product Engineering will continue to work tirelessly on end-to-end business process integration and innovations for continued customers success, hand in hand with our technology and cloud teams, our customers, and partners. Three simple pillars outlining the What, How, and Who will help us navigate.

What? Driving innovation and deliver end-to-end business processes

Our highest priority is to deliver on our promise to customers by realizing the vision of the Intelligent Enterprise: Focusing on integration beyond the technical level, driving functionality and innovation for our solutions, and embracing intelligence in our processes. It’s all about delivering already today what our customers will need tomorrow, on-premise, in the cloud, or in hybrid environments.

How? Be the most collaborative organization for maximum customer success

Our goal is to be the most collaborative and customer-focused organization because our teams build and run the solutions that are the heart of the Intelligent Enterprise. Because our solutions are mission-critical to our customers, a continuous dialogue with customers in various formats, such as events, roundtables, discussion forums, is our utmost priority. Same applies for our partners, be it in supporting small and medium sized enterprises or collaborating with cloud providers that run workloads of our enterprise solutions.

Who? Combine everyone’s uniqueness for one strong team

Our teams are spread around the globe, and we all have our challenges in both our private and work lives. We are all unique, in every respect. Diversity is a fact, inclusion an act - and our culture is the bridge to combine many perspectives as one team. What unifies us is our passion for creativity, engineering, continuous learning, working in an agile environment, and our ambition to deliver excellence in everything we build – for employee success.

Again, a heartfelt thank you to our Chairman Hasso Plattner and the entire SAP Supervisory Board, the SAP Executive Board, and most importantly, all colleagues. A very special thanks goes to Jennifer Morgan and Christian Klein for your trust over the past years.

Now, last but not least, this is also a special moment to thank my family from the bottom of my heart. I’m so lucky to have a wonderful family building the foundation of everything I do. Life is a house and family the foundation!