Meet the Indians


             

Meet the Indians Behind 

the Refresh at SAP


By 2008, Vishal Sikka, the first Chief Technology Officer of SAP, the world's third largest software company, had almost given up. Customers, analysts and competitors saw the i16-billion German multinational as too slow, unable to innovate or to adapt its enterprise software for the cloud. SAP's software is designed to manage business operations such as accounting, supply chain, inventory, human resources and customer relationships. Smaller rivals such as Salesforce.com had started giving SAP sleepless nights. As if that was not enough, Sikka was injured in a car accident.

Sikka wanted to quit. "I cannot do this any more," he told SAP Chairman and Co-founder Hasso Plattner over dinner one evening at a hotel in Aspen, Colorado. But Plattner was having none of it. "Damn it Vishal, you have to lead the intellectual renewal of SAP," he said, thumping the table. Sikka came away wondering how to reinvigorate the company. Should he form an intellectual renewal committee? Or hire a Chief Intellectual Renewal Officer? He spoke to other executives and concluded it had to be a product that would fire everybody's imagination. "The burden was not only to build a product, but to do it in a way that was exemplary," he says. "It had to demonstrate that the company could innovate. It needed to revive the pride of developers."  

Later that year, he started the HANA Project.
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Sikka, who is of Punjabi heritage, grew up in Rajkot. His father was a civil engineer with the Railways. After high school in Baroda, Sikka went to the US and ended up with a doctorate in computer science from Stanford University. After founding two start-ups, he joined SAP in July 2002. Sikka was appointed to SAP's board in 2010 and in addition to HANA, he also leads all of SAP's products and innovation.

While Sikka played a prominent role in conceptualising and developing HANA, as well as in the subsequent revival of SAP, important contributions to HANA came from around the world - China, France, Germany, India, Israel, South Korea and the US. Besides Sikka, a few other Indians are also playing global roles that could well determine the future of the product. 

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