The tale serves as an apt metaphor for a company that remains a major player after 46 years in the fast-changing and hyper-competitive technology industry.

Forget Bass Strait; Plattner has been riding choppy waves for decades.

Building a giant

SAP is the huge software platform that has underpinned some of the world's biggest companies for years, providing systems intended to help them run better. As well as enterprise resource planning and human resources products, it has acquired a large number of products in areas such as expense management, sales performance management, customer relationship management and big data analysis.

It has experienced many challenges, most recently the industry-shaking shift to systems based in the cloud and paid for on-demand – an enormous change from the huge on-premise enterprise systems that made SAP its fortune.

SAP has experienced many challenges, most recently the shift to systems based in the cloud and paid for on-demand. Darren Miller

With an ever-growing suite of start-ups and larger rivals nipping at its heels, SAP is positioning itself as a leader in the race to equip businesses with the latest in artificial intelligence capability.

It recently launched SAP Conversational AI, which enables companies to develop intelligent chatbots, new SAP Leonardo Machine Learning capabilities in its applications and new services that enable object detection, text recognition in images and text classification, which analyses and automatically categorises text documents without human intervention.


Globally, as in Australia, it is a work in progress, and Plattner says this has always been a characteristic of the business.

Rather than following a set trajectory and vision, he says that he, and the CEOs who have served under him since he moved to the chairman's office, have had to combine tactical acumen with strong leadership.

In 1996 Plattner skippered maxi yacht Morning Glory to a Sydney to Hobart race record. Bruce Miller

"We started the company with five founders and three employees, so it is obviously more difficult now that we have 96,000 people, but it is still simple really," he says.

"You need to find the right strategy and then we need leaders, otherwise 4500 people don't start marching … we have known this since Caesar."

Dual CEOs

Finding that strategy has not always been easy. SAP thrived for decades before struggling from the end of the last decade when clients increasingly started to demand software be hosted in the cloud and charged by usage, rather than lengthy licenses for on-premise systems.

A core product called SAP Business ByDesign, which was launched in 2007, proved expensive but unpopular and added to a sense that the company was struggling to find a sense of direction in the new cloud era.


Plattner says leadership principals that apply to leading a team of five can also apply to much larger organisations. Darren Miller

An experiment with dual CEOs Leo Apotheker and Henning Kagermann lasted a year before Apotheker became sole CEO, then departed after just eight months in the top job.

With Plattner reportedly then taking a more active role in product advice, the company began to regain its mojo under the joint stewardship of American Bill McDermott and Dane Jim Hagemann Snabe.

With products based around its High Performance Analytic Appliance (HANA) database, which enables AI-style real-time analytical insights, the company has returned to relevance under McDermott as sole CEO. Its most recent earnings showed its cloud revenue and profits growing impressively, as more of its customers shift off their older software. McDermott has said it is "taking the market by storm".

Plattner believes SAP needed an American CEO to properly market and sell its ideas to an increasingly well-served market. Despite having presided over dual CEOs twice, he says the model only works in certain circumstances.

A hugely important figure in German business, Plattner has the ear of Chancellor Angela Merkel. Bernd von Jutrczenka

"It depends on the people you have … many mid-sized companies in Germany are run by dual leadership, so it can work," he says.

"It works best if you have one for the product and one for the go-to-market strategy. Brothers are good at that, because they have fought every fight in their life already, so they can continue to do this."


Strong CEOs

Even with appearances at SAPPHIRE NOW by the ebullient McDermott, rock star Jon Bon Jovi and movie star Charlize Theron, it is clear Plattner is the star of the show.

He hosts a two-hour on-stage session with a delightfully cantankerous air, showing no mercy to a senior executive whose live demonstration fails to fire before explaining the latest features of SAP's software, demonstrating along the way that he remains on the cutting edge of tech.

The conference also illustrates how the personalities of Plattner and McDermott could not be more different. While the German is all gruff genius on stage, his American CEO is so supremely confident he thinks nothing of taking to the concert stage ahead of a performance by pop star Justin Timberlake and exhorting the singer to "give us the show of your life, brother".

So how does Plattner remain influential without butting heads with a CEO with such a strong character?

"It is true we are not digital twins, but the relationship is very good. With Bill, I've no desire to change anything or to have a different relationship," Plattner says.

"I have to try not to step on the feet too often, because you can only criticise so much as a chairman … we cannot permanently criticise and permanently push, push, push.

Plattner is a very different personality to SAP CEO Bill McDermott, who has the chutzpah to hold his own on stage with rock star Jon Bon Jovi. Gene X. Hwang


"It is good to push, but you have to let them make decisions. If you can convince them that a different direction is better, fine. But you cannot order it."

Staying fresh

The sailing habit explains Plattner's good physical health, but he says he has had to work to ensure he retains the enthusiasm to be so involved in business after such a long time.

He says it has been important to keep in touch with younger emerging companies and people. He has a venture capital fund that invests in tech start-ups and he also lends his name to the Hasso Plattner Institute of Design at Stanford University, in which he invested $US35 million in 2005.

He says his involvement with the Hasso Plattner Institute at the University of Potsdam, near Berlin, is particularly important.

"I don't know how well I would be going if we hadn't turned the company around after 2008 … for physical health I ask if I want to go into a fight with everybody, and as long as the company is doing well, it's easy," he says.

"The biggest help was my computer science institute in Potsdam, where I have to lecture young students, and that actually rejuvenated my IT knowledge completely."

As he looks at the broader tech scene, Plattner shares the concerns of others about the impact of automation on jobs and society.


He believes governments and industry must work much closer together to avoid huge societal disruption and harness the growing power of artificial intelligence technology, and does not share the empty optimism of those in the tech realm who believe everything will simply work out fine.

Plattner believes there are many challenges ahead for society in dealing with the scourge of social media manipulation. Darren Miller

"We don't know how much it will affect the jobs," he says. "But if these guys are as successful as they think – oh my God … the systems [in all companies] will run like a Walt Disney cartoon, 50 years ago, where the cars were manufactured completely automatically."

Big tech concerns

He saves his greatest condemnation for the scourge of fake news and societal manipulation on large social media platforms such as Facebook and Twitter.

Despite the founders of the social giants pledging to do more to ensure public debate is not artificially skewed, Plattner believes the solution will have to come from law enforcement and criminal penalties.

He says humans are genetically wired to thrive on rumours, dating back to ancient times when rumours about what was going on in the next village would be on everyone's mind. He fears social platforms have simply become rumour distribution machines of unbelievable power.

"I was very optimistic that social networks would improve access to information and democracy in general, but I am very disappointed that the opposite is happening," he says.


"Professional information producers undermine the social networks, undermine states and elections. It is unbelievable what is happening and we have a huge problem."

Plattner draws a parallel with insider trading, which he says is as easy to commit as social media manipulation, but is not so common because people know they will be slugged with criminal convictions.

"This is all before we look at the exploitation of personal data, where we are naked in front of the social networks, because we undress ourselves, and not only literally," he says.

Hasso Plattner holds court on stage at the SAPPHIRE NOW 2018 conference in Orlando. Lukas Lowack

"I think this will continue until we have the legal systems properly looking at it, and have strong laws that people have to obey."

The writer attended the SAPPHIRE NOW conference as a guest of SAP.