SAP的夏嘉西相信简单易用的软件将击垮Oracle企业软件的市场份额

SAP的夏嘉西相信简单易用的软件将击垮Oracle企业软件的市场份额（SAP's Agassi Bets Simpler Software Will Arrest Oracle Gains ）

SAP的夏嘉西37岁的时候就成为这个世界第三大软件公司的高级副总裁，他的经历很令人佩服，看过他的演讲，很喜欢夏嘉西的风格，佩服他创业的精神、技术领袖的才能，这篇转载的文章简单的介绍了他的理念和创业过程，值得一读。

摘要

SAP's Agassi Bets Simpler Software Will Arrest Oracle Gains

By Benedikt Kammel

Sept. 6 (Bloomberg) -- Shai Agassi sold his unprofitable company to SAP AG five years ago. He's now leading SAP's campaign to hold off Oracle Corp., which has muscled into business software with $19.5 billion of acquisitions since December 2004.

Agassi is developing a new generation of software that Walldorf, Germany-based SAP says will make its products more flexible, easier to use and better able to communicate with competing software. Born in Israel, he took charge of product development globally last year after becoming the company's youngest and first non-German board member in April 2002.

Agassi, 38, is racing to beat Larry Ellison's Oracle, which pledges to have its new suite of software ready by 2008. His success will determine whether SAP keeps its lead in the $25 billion market. SAP shares dropped the most in three years on July 13, when the company said software sales rose less than expected and Oracle and Microsoft Corp. gained market share.

``The quality of new products is obviously key as SAP needs to show why current and potential customers should come to use their software,'' says Michiel Plakman, who manages about $10 billion of technology stocks, including shares of SAP, Oracle and Microsoft, at Robeco Group in Rotterdam. ``What I want to see is that they start reaping what they invested in growth.''

The shares of SAP have fallen 20 percent to 150.08 euros ($192.37) since April 10. Oracle's stock is up 14 percent to $15.78 in the same period.

SAP, whose software is used to run tasks such as billing, accounting and inventory management, is betting its new version will attract customers as a boom in mergers forces companies to integrate disparate software systems. Companies in industries such as banking and retail also are moving away from homegrown systems and buying products from SAP or Oracle.

`Awake at Night'

Agassi says SAP's new system will solve a conundrum faced by companies: how to update software often without having to shut down their systems to make the changes. The product functions as a toolbox that lets users add or subtract components made by any vendor without touching the SAP backbone.

``Customers tell us that they want us to touch their backbone twice every decade and that this should happen on a Saturday,'' says Agassi, who is based in Palo Alto, California. ``But their next sentence is that they want innovation and that they need it every quarter. It's this dichotomy that's kept companies awake at night for a long time.''

All of SAP's products will be able to run on the new platform by next year, Agassi says. He forecasts 15,000 companies will adopt the system by 2008. By that time, Redwood City, California-based Oracle plans to be offering its new Fusion suite, which will combine aspects of the software it acquired through takeovers.

CEO Candidate

At SAP, Agassi's ability to manage the changeover to the new product may make him a candidate to succeed Chief Executive Officer Henning Kagermann, whose contract expires at the end of next year. Kagermann, 59, hasn't said whether he will stay on.

``He rose to a very high position very fast,'' Jella Benner- Heinacher, an SAP investor and representative for the DSW German shareholders association, says of Agassi. ``It's very probable that he'll be the successor.''

One handicap may be that he speaks little German.

Another potential candidate is Apotheker, Benner-Heinacher says. Apotheker, a German based in Paris, joined SAP in 1988 and became a board member in 2002. He's fluent in five languages and he earned a master's in business administration from Hebrew University in Jerusalem.

Flexible Software

SAP's move toward more flexible software, and away from monolithic systems that are hard to upgrade, isn't new. Banks started exploring what the software industry calls service- oriented architectures, or SOA, in the late 1990s. Still, it was Agassi who turned the idea into a product that almost 2,000 SAP clients already use.

``In five years, all vendors will have an SOA, and the ones that don't make the transition in time may get wiped out,'' says Jim Hagemann Snabe, who is one of SAP's six corporate officers.

Opinions are split over whether Agassi can succeed, especially after SAP's announcement it had lost ground to Oracle.

Bruce Richardson, chief research officer at AMR Research Inc., a Boston-based technology research firm, says the heat is on SAP to convince customers of the benefits of upgrading to its new product.

Wait and See

``SAP said that they want to redo the entire house, but they've only painted the walls so far,'' he says. ``Customers are in wait-and-see mode.''

JPMorgan Chase & Co. on July 21 cut its recommendation on SAP to ``underweight,'' the lowest rating in at least two years, assuming SAP's performance will lag behind other software stocks in the next six to 12 months. The firm also reduced its target price on SAP to 120 euros from 225 euros.

By contrast, ABN Amro Holding NV analyst Ariel Bauer is sticking by his advice to buy the stock, forecasting the shares will rise to 280 euros. As Agassi's products move SAP to a ``radically new model,'' he expects SAP's net income and cash pile to double within three years. ``Competitors will struggle to retaliate,'' Bauer says.

A week after reporting second-quarter sales that missed analysts' forecasts, Kagermann posted the fastest quarterly profit growth in three years and said SAP would meet its earnings and sales targets this year. He forecast software license sales, a measure of future fees from maintenance and consulting, would rise 15 percent to 17 percent this year.

Plattner

SAP was created in 1972 by five German software engineers who defected from International Business Machines Corp. It has grown into Europe's largest software maker, with more than 35,800 employees worldwide and 35,000 customers. Supervisory Board Chairman Hasso Plattner, one of SAP's founders, is still the company's largest shareholder.

``If SAP hadn't happened, then the largest industry in Walldorf right now would be asparagus,'' Agassi says of SAP's hometown of 14,474 inhabitants, about an hour south of Frankfurt.

Plattner, 62, has been one of Agassi's mentors. He was the architect of most of SAP's technological developments, including its R/3 generation of software, which Agassi is now replacing. Plattner handed software development to Agassi in February 2003.

When asked about his potential to become CEO, Agassi says his only focus is developing software. Agassi is the second-best paid member of SAP's seven-member management board behind CEO Kagermann, earning 4 million euros last year. He manages the largest team at SAP after the sales force.

`Best Job'

``I have the best job at SAP right now,'' he says. ``I get to innovate and to create, and you can't ask for anything more. The rest is less than negligible.''

Agassi started programming when he was 6 or 7, says his father, Reuven Agassi, who lives in Raanana, Israel, and helps technology start-ups develop.

``Other kids collected baseball cards, I collected punch cards,'' Agassi, who drives a 469 horsepower Mercedes-Benz E- class car, said in June at a convention of entrepreneurs in Potsdam, near Berlin.

Born near Tel Aviv, Agassi earned a bachelor's degree at Technion, Israel's Institute of Technology, in Haifa. He started his first company at the age of 21. In 1990, he recruited his father to help run a company called Quicksoft Ltd. He renamed it TopTier Software Inc. and moved it to California.

Agassi says he tried and failed to get meetings with Plattner in the 1990s, so he turned to Dutch software entrepreneur Jan Baan, whose company at the time was second in business software to SAP.

`On the Shoulders of Giants'

Baan agreed to invest 14 million euros in TopTier after meeting Agassi for the first time at his country estate in the Dutch provincial town of Putten in 1996.

``I did it on trust,'' says Baan, 60, whose own software company escaped bankruptcy before he sold it. ``I realized he's an entrepreneur who understands technology and is able to translate that knowledge into market opportunities.''

In 2000, as the technology bubble burst, Agassi persuaded Baan to scrap a plan to take TopTier public. SAP bought the company for $400 million in cash in 2001, its biggest purchase to date.

``He's proven his entrepreneurial skills, especially when he managed to sell to us at the right time,'' says Dietmar Hopp, 66, another billionaire co-founder of SAP, who retired as supervisory board chairman last year.

Agassi calls his strategy of seeking out support from Baan and Plattner ``standing on the shoulders of giants.'' Speaking at the Potsdam convention, Agassi said the best way to build a small business is to use the ``gravity'' of senior business leaders and large companies ``to catapult you to the next thing.''

``Learning from Hasso has been like learning from Henry Ford in the car industry,'' Agassi said. ``You can't ask for anything more.''

 

 

SAP AG
On the Record: Shai Agassi He's looking to find genius -- all over the world
-
Sunday, June 11, 2006

Shai Agassi is a technology wunderkind who programmed his first computer at 7, sold one of his companies for $400 million at the ripe old age of 30 and now ranks second in command at the world's largest application software firm for large businesses.

And he's still only 38.

A native of Israel and one of the first non-Germans to crack SAP's top management, Agassi's main competition is Oracle Corp. and its feisty chief executive, Larry Ellison.

We recently sat down with Agassi to discuss Ellison, software consolidation, globalization and Israel, among other things.

We also found out why the young and powerful Agassi fired his own dad at a family reunion.

Read on to find out. The following has been edited for length and clarity.

Q: Oracle, your biggest competitor, has been doing a lot lately. Larry Ellison has been out there quite a bit in the last couple of years, particularly, talking about the consolidation of the software industry.

A: Yes. He predicted he will consolidate the industry. (Group laughter)

Q: And now he's doing it. How big of a threat is that to SAP?

A: It definitely changes and accelerates the pace of events in our industry. Whether it's the prophecy or the fulfillment of the prophecy, you know, remains to be seen.

Q: What's your goal in relation to Oracle?

A: Our goal is not in relation to Oracle. Our goal is in relation to where we are, where we see ourselves. If you look at market share -- us, Oracle, Microsoft, just the three big players -- we're now at 63 or 64 percent of the market. Compared to the other two guys, it's more than twice the second guy.

Q: And that's of which market?

A: New license revenue, trailing twelve months, enterprise applications. So including midmarket, we are twice as big as Oracle, including all their acquisitions and new licenses. So you can't compare yourselves always to Oracle. It's like trying to drive a car and looking in the back, really, really far into the horizon to try and see what you want to do. It's not the way to drive.

Q: So who's in the front windshield?

A: The biggest thing we're looking at is how do we expand usage of our applications. I go into a corporation, put in the backbone. Then you set the processes for our company, then you ask yourself, "Why is it that only 20 percent of the employees in the company use this software?" What we want to see is 100 percent of the employees use SAP when SAP is the backbone.

Q: For our average reader, what kind of applications are those? What kind of software are we talking about?

A: Look at the back-end systems of this newspaper. When your employees go on vacation, they need to notify somebody, right? It needs to be reduced off the number of days for vacation the company needs to account for.

It's the mundane stuff that makes the organization continue to function. We sort of tend to forget that. People say it's not core to the mission. It's not making a big difference. But if you think of thousands of employees, it makes a big difference in the time that people are spending on non-core issues versus the time they spend doing something more useful, more valuable.

Now we move into stuff that managers do. How do I plan my budget? How do I plan my bonuses, my year, my teams? How do I reorganize?

Then you move into the sales organization. How do I look at my opportunities, my pipeline? It's in the backbone. The data is there. But if it's not exposed to you -- if you're not notified on the exception that happened, which events you need to handle -- you're really missing a lot of valuable information.

Q: On-demand software, where customers use software that is stored and maintained by another company, is a growing trend in your industry. How big of a threat is that to your business?

A: My personal view is you'll see three consumption models at the end. The first model is where I buy, I install, I modify, I maintain it. It's my system. So I'm independent. Then you'll see the on-demand model. I sign on to the program and I trust you to take me in the right direction. And I trust that the software is not going to die at the end of every quarter.

Then there will be a model somewhere in between that I'm calling the managed appliance model. I want my box, but I want you to manage it for me and so you give me the software. You tell me when there's a wave of upgrades. If I decide to turn it on or off, it's my decision. But I don't need to manage it. You manage it for me.

It's not going to be a binary decision for a company -- do I go to Model A, B or C. It'll be a hybrid across all these models.

Q: There have been questions about security and reliability with the on-demand software companies. Is the on-demand model reliable or are there problems?

A: We also have an on-demand business and we make on-demand secure and reliable. The real issue is again that transportability. Can I take my on-demand system after two years where I paid you monthly, move it on premise, make changes and pay you once? Or is that code designed to be shared with lots of other people and I can't really take that system on premise? That hybrid approach is still not solved by the pure play on-demand sellers, and we believe we cracked that already.

Q: So it doesn't sound like you think on-demand is going to become the future of software?

A: I think it's trendy. I don't think it disappears and I don't think it takes over the world. I think it becomes one more consumption wave. I'm sure you guys wrote a Tom Siebel article four or five years ago where he was supposed to take over the whole software industry.

Q: He was hoping.

A: Where is Tom Siebel?

Q: On the golf course?

A: (Laughs)

Q: Could you explain to us what your job is for SAP?

A: I'm in charge of all products, all technology. Globally we have 10,000 engineers, roughly, that work on these products.

Q: But you've emerged as the face and the voice of SAP here in Silicon Valley. How did that come to be?

A: I just live here.

Q: But SAP is based in Germany. Why do you live here?

A: Great weather. My wife and kids are here. Look, SAP is probably the most globalized company you can imagine. We have a headquarters in Germany, an hour south of Frankfurt. But the head of sales is in Paris. And the head of products is in Palo Alto. Our chairman is shuttling between all locations. We mirror our customers.

Q: How does that work for you on a personal level?

A: 230,000 frequent flier miles on Lufthansa just in the first quarter.

Q: I thought technology was supposed to save us from all that. Don't you use teleconferencing?

A: We couldn't have done what we're doing now without BlackBerrying 24 hours a day. We all got addicted to the blinking red light. I've got a video conferencing system at home. When I need to sit down at midnight and start a call until 7 o'clock in the morning, we do that from home. But at the end of the day you've got people -- real teams, real people, with real passion, and you've got to be with them. To give an example, we did a developers kickoff meeting recently with our top 1,000 developers, all in Frankfurt. We set our annual agenda there.

Q: They came from all over the world?

A: From all over the world -- India, China, Israel, you know, Canada, California -- everywhere. But then we took it to every lab, so I was in the lab in China, in Shanghai, and repeated the same story again to everybody in China. And we were in Israel a week ago and we brought in the senior management of development to the lab in Israel and talked about that. And two weeks before that, we were in the lab in Palo Alto and we did the same thing with 2,000 people here in Palo Alto.

So we take the same message because they need that level of interaction. They need to feel part of a team even though you can't get all 10,000 to fly out to one location just to meet with them for that one day. We arrange things differently. We go to different development methodologies. We get small teams working. We found out that small teams actually work better than big teams.

One thing we've found is smarts are equally distributed around the whole world. You can't find geniuses only in one geographic location. Innovation is equally distributed around the world. Passion and drive are equally distributed around the world.

Q: The global structure of your company gives you a unique perspective on Silicon Valley. What's the future of the valley? Is it still the center of the technology universe?

A: I think that the valley is secured for a very, very, very long time, because it's got this confluence of early adopters and early access to technology. It also has a rich network of headquarters and smart people.

I still remember, I came into the valley in 1995 for good, but the first time I think was 1992. Up until then, I used to read the magazines. But then I drove down 101 and all the logos became buildings. I didn't know back then what I know now, but I remember seeing the Oracle buildings for the first time. I didn't know Darth Vader was in there, but ... (Group laughter)

There was the Sun building and the Apple building. I drove around the Apple campus three times because for me it was an event. I was at Apple for the first time in my life.

When you go through that kind of an experience and then you meet the people and you see all the people who come here are passion-driven. This is the mecca of technology. You don't get that in a lot of different places around the world. You get different things in other places around the world. We open up 100 jobs in India and we get 10,000 resumes in the first three weeks, right? I can bring in 500 master's degree holders who are extremely talented. Like that. (Snaps his fingers)

Q: Are you expanding in India?

A: We're expanding, but you can't put all of your development in India because if something happened, you're stuck with all of your development in India.

Q: Something political, for instance?

A: So many different things can happen. You need to balance. And part of the greatness of what we've got at SAP is that we know how to go global. For Oracle, going global meant that they went to the East Bay. For Microsoft it meant going on the other side of the freeway. For us, global is truly global. We're 24 hours around the clock at all locations. And there's not a center hub. Germany is not the center hub. It's one of the locations -- a very, very important location. The most important location, but it's one of many.

Q: SAP acquired your company, TopTier, in 2001. Since then, you've shot up the company's ranks. Was that unusual for them to take somebody from outside the company and see that kind of fast rise, especially for someone your age?

A: I came in and my first day was April 1, 2001. Three weeks later, we had our senior executive team meeting and I was invited. It was in Germany and there were 50 people and top executives in the company. Three of them were non-German of the top 50. We held our last senior executive team meeting in Palo Alto and there were about 60 or so people in the room and half of them were non-German. And that was five years after I came in.

Q: So there has been a huge change at SAP in a short period of time?

A: Over the last five years, we have not just globalized our workforce, but globalized our thinking and management. Today, and this is not just propaganda, SAP is one of the most globalized companies in the world.

Q: I guess maybe it is a sign of the times that somebody from Israel could be working so high up in a German company?

A: Can I tell you the other secret? The head of our customer organization is a graduate of the Hebrew University and spent 10 years of his life in Israel. So both of us are ex-Israelis.

Q: Do you ever have days or projects when you feel like being so global is a burden? Do you always feel like this is working?

A: I'm not sure it always works. On the other hand, if we try to concentrate everything in one location, I'm sure it won't work. Once you get to that kind of situation, you're bound to need to understand how to make it work the best way possible. Cultural differences are huge and you need to learn how to go around and deal with them.

Q: How many days of the year do you travel?

A: Too many. Last year I think I was away from Palo Alto a total of 29 weeks.

Q: How do you deal with having a family?

A: It's a cliche, but they need to know that you care. They need to know that if something happened, I would cancel anything. If I need to come back and I really needed to be back here I could turn around and cancel a whole week worth of meetings. It doesn't matter what it was. It happens. Once a year. Sometimes I get a phone call that my son has melted down and I need to come back. He's 9 years old and I (also) have a 6-year-old.

On the other hand, I look at it in a broader context. I think kids learn a lot more from example than from what you tell them to do. When they grow up, they'll understand I had enough money to retire at a very, very young age. But I stuck to my passion and continued to be creative. I did those things in spite of the fact that there wasn't a financial motivation.

They probably won't have the same financial drive because they'll start from a better position than I started. If they can continue to be driven by their creative juices and creative motivation, then in spite of the fact that they won't need the money, they will go and do something creative with their life. I think that is the best example they can get.

Q: Did you think about hanging it up? You had enough money to retire at 30.

A: I was stupid enough to be quoted about that at the age of 23 in Israel's No. 1 newspaper. They asked me what I was going to do and what was (my) goal in life. I said, "to retire at the age of 30." I shook hands on the sale of my company the day after my 30th birthday. I knew that by the age of 30 I could sell the company and retire, but I didn't.

Q: At 23, that's what you thought you wanted to do. That's changed?

A: I think that what I saw is that I didn't want to end up at the age of 50 or 60 working because I had to work. I wanted to work because I wanted to work. I do something that impacts the world, is meaningful and creative. I didn't want to feel like I was going to work because I didn't have a choice. I had this very meticulous strategy on how I get to 30 and all that. The day after my birthday there was no plan anymore. Since then, I have meandered and I've been lucky about what's happened to me.

Q: To put that into context, is that something that you had seen in your father?

A: My father is 65 years old and he just started his sixth career about four months ago.

Q: Presumably he doesn't have to work either?

A: We were partners in four of our companies. We had a great deal. He would mentor me and be my partner and we split our company 50-50.

Q: He was the business guy and you were the technology guy?

A: I was the visionary and he anchored me in reality. He really taught me the basics of all my core values across the board. I was extremely fortunate. We started four companies together in Israel between my 22nd and 24th birthdays. We ran them in parallel. Then we sort of split. I moved to the States and I took one of the companies to the U.S. and he ran the other three.

We really split when I sold the company and moved on with that. After I got into SAP a year later, I introduced him to (SAP founder) Hasso Plattner and SAP bought my father's company. It was one of the three that we started together. So my father joined SAP.

That was a small-business software company. When we purchased it, it was building software that was available in three countries around the world, those being Israel, Poland and Panama. Three years later, it was available in 45 countries around the world. It had thousands of customers.

Later that year, we met in Mexico for a family reunion. And he comes in so stressed out. I'm looking at this man and he doesn't spend any money, but even if he wanted to spend money, he couldn't spend it all in this lifetime.

He was just physically stressed. And I said, "You're fired. You can't do this anymore. You're not going to get a heart attack under my watch." It was not because he didn't do well, it was because of what it did to him. I couldn't take it. He reported to me and if something in my organization causes him so much stress, that is on me. This was about a year and a half ago.

Q: You fired your dad? How did he take that?

A: Very bad for the first six months. He started his new career. He's now distributing software in Israel. He started a new company, opened up a new office, secured a location and he hasn't made a single penny of salary or profit. All of it is philanthropy. He's investing all his money in startups. He's mentoring startups. He started a combination software distribution company and an incubator for startups. It's his way of giving back.

Q: Was he seriously angry at you?

A: He's a very special man. His way of showing anger is very different. He went around to all his friends and said, "My son fired me." That's his way of showing anger. I think at the end he understood that it wasn't healthy for him and it wasn't good for him.

Q: And you guys are amicable now?

A: We were amicable even during the vacation in Mexico. He's my dad.

Q: Any brothers or sisters?

A: I have a brother who works at SAP and a sister that is not working at