Hasso Plattner, Storyteller

Dr. Hasso Plattner has finally stepped down from official duties at SAP. Over his 5 decades at the company he enriched the lives of tens of thousands of people around the world.

I got to see a different side of the man few others did. As a story teller. 

I first ‘met’ SAP in 1989. I was on assignment at PwC London for a couple of years. We had a brand new data center in the Docklands when that area was just starting to be developed and I led a team which installed and prototyped use cases on the mainframe based R/2 system. We would demo it to clients along with comparative functionality in the US based McCormack & Dodge system. Back in the US I next led an internal ‘Gartner Group’ which helped clients evaluate the emerging client/server market - SAP R/3, Oracle, PeopleSoft, i2 and others. I then went on to do a stint at Gartner and played a small role in SAP’s explosive growth in the US from 1995 to 2000. 

I first met him in person in 1996 but he was already a legend leading one of the few companies which had pioneered packaged software and had navigated frequent architectural shifts and global expansion. 

Hasso liked to set a couple of hours aside to meet with analysts at each Sapphire. I was part of the Gartner contingent. It was not an auspicious encounter. I had written a paper which talked about the high SAP TCO. He stormed into the room waving my paper and asking ‘who the fxxx wrote this?’ I was at the other end of the room and desperately tried to hide. After he finished screaming, he broke out into the sweetest smile. I started to finally breathe. 

Fortunately our later meetings were much more pleasant. He continued to meet us analysts at every Sapphire. Most of my colleagues and the analyst in me would want to geek out with him - 2 v 3 tier architecture, multi-tenancy, aggregates and memory based databases.  The author in me would wait for his human side to show up. Fortunately he would also share sailing, auto racing, golf and countless other stories. And talk about early customers like ICI and the code he personally wrote and about his beloved guitar. Not to forget, stuff which would make his PR folks cringe. I remember a couple of times they ran out and warned me ‘you cannot write about ABC’ 

I shared his story telling in one of my books 

This meeting was safe enough - talk of multi tenancy, quantum computing, blockchain, microservices. But then he was talking about Tom Sawyer and Peter Pan, two characters who have brought him much joy throughout life.

He was doing his best Mark Twain describing how young Tom Sawyer had turned whitewashing a picket fence - a punishment for skipping school - into a group activity. He had conned his friends into thinking it was fun and required a unique skill - 'only one in a thousand, maybe two thousand can do it'. So much so that his friends paid him for the privilege of doing that tedious task in the hot sun.

The tale has clearly helped Hasso motivate customers and employees over the decades even when he is proposing something radical. 

Somehow, I don’t think the man will just retire to golf or academia. I hope he writes a couple of books and tells lots about the 5 decades of enterprise software and weaves in a bunch of stories from his travels, his charities, from HPI etc. in addition.

I would be honored to help him tell his story if he needs help. It would be an instant classic and a nice reminder to everyone that today’s cloud computing world is built on the shoulders of what giants like Hasso pioneered.

In one of our last meetings he told me he was proud how young SAP felt. He is a natural born teacher and story teller.

In the meantime Hasso, to quote from the Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, 

“So long and thanks for all the fish”