SAP News

All Bases Covered: "In part, I thought back to my experience at Informatica. Although we were on the pioneering edge and pushing what I believe was a state-of-the-art product for analytics, we just did not have the go-to-market presence that a larger company like SAP has today. Although we built a good product, if large companies like SAP got their act together, it was going to be very, very hard for the standalone players in analytics, largely because analytics is too tied to the core business process. It can't be treated as a bolt-on application. So, it was the inflection point of the technology at SAP becoming more mature, and my sense that SAP could win by what I call mass and class. By 'mass,' I mean the weight of our customers and our 60 percent market share. By 'class,' I mean two things, the first being the products and technology SAP began to develop in the last two or three years that were starting to become best of breed in many areas. The other part of the class aspect was the team that Leo [Apotheker] and Shai [Agassi] had developed, with Leo on the sales side and Shai on the product side. This was also attracting many of the most talented industry people I had met from Siebel, PeopleSoft, Oracle and others. We have got a big plan ahead of us, and I'm happy to play a part in orchestrating it."