Back in January, German giant SAP AG vehemently denied that its co-founder and co-chief executive Dietmar Hopp was about to retire, but at the company’s annual meeting on Thursday, it looks as though Hopp will stand down from the day to day running of the company and move upstairs as chairman of SAP’s supervisory board. Hopp, a one-time IBM Corp employee in Mannheim, Germany, co- founded SAP 26 years ago, and steps down at a time when the company boasts 1997 turnover of $3.36bn and is larger than its next four closest enterprise resource planning software rivals all combined. He will be succeeded by Henning Kagermann, who joined SAP’s executive board in 1991 and was responsible for the development of R/3 financial and accounting applications and international business development. He also oversaw the management of the European region excluding Germany. Hopp’s co- founder Klaus Tschira will apparently also resign from the executive board this month and seek election to the supervisory board, company officials said. The company denies Hopp’s standing down has anything to do with insider trading allegations last year (CI No 3,155). Hopp said he thought his timing was just right, developing leadership is crucial to SAP, and leaving ‘too late’ would be worse than leaving ‘too soon’, he said. Company spokesperson Gerhard Rickes says Hopp fully intended to hand over the reins at a time when the company did not need to make any changes at the top, but when he could therefore hand over smoothly to his successor. At 57, he felt he would have to move on at some point, and chose to do it sooner rather than later, so that he could continue to guide the company from the supervisory board, Rickes told Computergram. Hopp’s move coincides with, but is not otherwise linked to, the company’s plans for some major internal reorganization. There are two aspects to this restructuring, the first being to focus the company’s development teams around some 16 vertical market sectors. This would have happened even if Hopp had stayed where he was, says Rickes. The second, and perhaps more important change is the company’s shift from being a one product company, based around its R/3 ERP system which has taken over from the mainframe R/2 version in the past five years, to offering a series of new products, which will run either integrated with R/3 or completely standalone. The first three, due out later this year, are SAP Business Information Warehouse, the SAP Advanced Planner and Optimizer supply chain management package, and the SAP Sales Force Automation package (CI No 3,365). Rickes says the company is also gearing up internally to build the service and support infrastructure needed to support these products. In addition to the management restructuring, SAP is planning to add around 5,000 employees to its staff of 13,000.
á
