This article takes shape from various sources, but in particular from a text that I learned about years ago, when I worked for SAP Italia: it is ” Anticipating Change – Secrets Behind the SAP Empire”, and it was essentially a very in-depth interview with Hasso Plattner .
To this day I know many who work in this industry, and in this case at SAP, who have no idea who this exceptional personality is. Hasso is one of the 4 founders of SAP AG, but in fact she has always been the inspiring soul and the engine that has allowed this company to become the world leader in the field of Business applications.
hasso Plattner has always had an immoderate passion for competitive sailing. In fact, his longtime rival in this field has always been Oracle’s CEO, Larry Ellison, who is also passionate about sailing. Hasso has always had a difficult and rather angular character, also the result of his witty and powerful intelligence (which led him to finish his university studies with a thesis on a modification to a calculation algorithm that improved its performance by over 500 % ). The experts were well aware of his outbursts, sometimes even on the occasion of official dinners with clients, if by chance the regatta that had just ended had an unfavorable outcome.
hasso Plattner developed financial applications for 15 years . Initially, Dietmar Hopp developed the purchasing side, and Claus Wellenreuther the financial side ; there were essentially 2 products: System R and System F; when Wellerenreuther left SAP at the end of the 1970s , the two products were merged into a single System R, and from there Hasso continued the financial development part . Over the years, other important personalities will join him, such as Henning Kagermann, a theoretical physicist who joined SAP in 1982 and developed the part of Cost Accounting and Controlling (for those familiar with these modules, the limpid logic that characterizes them is evident, like an equation in theoretical physics) and over the years became Hasso ‘s right-hand man .
This text explains the origins of SAP, which laid the foundations for future evolutions and explains the spirit of continuous adaptation to changes in endogenous factors and the increasingly exponential speed of evolution that has characterized this sector over the years.
SAP (System Analysis Program development ) was formally born in April 1972 by 5 engineers working for IBM, at the time the absolute point of reference in this sector. The business was mainly to sell the hardware. The five engineers are called Dietmar Hopp , Hasso Plattner , Klaus E. Tschira , Hans -Werner Ector and Claus Wellenreuther . They open an office in Mannheim, but mostly work for their customers. In 1980 Claus Wellenreuther leaves SAP.
The first customer is a German company, ICI (Imperial Chemical Industries), a chemical industry in Ostringen .
Now, to understand the revolutionary concept of “Real Time” at the time, it is necessary to understand that the technology of the time was based on punched cards, which were “read” by computers and returned the results on a printer. We are in the early 70s, on the other side of the ocean the revolution of low-cost microprocessors has yet to take place, Chuck’s 6502 Peddle , in Berkeley still “study” Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniack , just as Bill Gates is still a pimply but very intelligent and astute boy who will bring MS DOS to IBM devices that they will call Personal Computers (PCs) and contribute to the standardization of the revolution informatics.
On this side of the ocean, our 4 friends were busy developing an accounting management system that will then integrate the other sectors and take on the concept of ERP (Enterprise Resource Planning) in a technologically ridiculous contest it would appear today.
For example, this was “System R”
That is, a briefcase full of punch cards. It is said that one day this briefcase fell from the hands of Hasso Plattner and fell into a puddle opening up and scattering all the ballots into the water. It took days to put them back. SAP had risked ending his story in a trivial puddle. Sometimes life can be mocking. But in two or three days they managed to sort things out, but from that day on they didn’t give any more suitcases to take to Hasso .
The SAP project was born when Hasso and his future partners were still working at IBM. They proposed to develop the software internally, but were told that they had to deal with selling the iron, the real business of those times, and to let the department that was in charge develop the software.
So they decided to leave IBM and create SAP, formally in April 1972. It has been said that the first customer was the German ICI, which in any case was a multinational, and therefore allowed the development of the software in certain directions such as the possibility of manage multiple currencies, multiple languages, companies and how to manage the structuring and dialogue of these companies. The 4 partners went to the customer by day, carried out commercial activities and by night they developed the software. In short , they had a certain entrepreneurial spirit which evidently would have led to future development. Unlike the American West Coast, SAP did not use venture capital at the time. capitalists ; no external capital, everything in house, according to the good European tradition of those times.
In the first year the total staff of the company consisted of 10 employees. The initial growth was not very fast, but it accelerated a lot from the mid-1970s.
Prior to the development of R/2, they took on a new international customer, John Deere. This project was developed on the idea that the software should run on a central computer and serve other countries, therefore different legal entities , different tax requirements and different languages. In that project the concept of division was born.
In 1975-76 the system became multilingual . In the meantime, new clients were taken on such as Grundig Television System and other multinationals who had increasingly high levels of management complexity. The time was coming to develop a new release, also because at the end of the 70s the employees had risen to 80, many of whom were developers.
The development of R/2 began in 1979, which took shape in the early 1980s, while new offices were opened in Walldorf , which over the years would become the headquarters of SAP.
R/2 was initially developed based on IBM technology announced in the late 1980s called System Application Architecture (SAA). Such architecture used C language , Presentation Manager and SQL as database. But IBM’s architecture didn’t seem to deliver on its promise; so in 1988 they decided to build the foundation of the new software on a UNIX basis. Unable to coexist UNIX on the Mainframe, they developed a new software infrastructure that could be compatible, and among the various components was a new programming language which they called ABAP/4. Then they were able to develop applications with this language on DB2-based mainframes.
The R/2 system reached about 2200 installations. At the end of 1999 there will still be about 850 R/2 installations worldwide, which will then be migrated to the next generation of software, based on client-server technology and on an architectural system composed of three layers : database, application server and presentation server .
It will be called SAP R/3