Why didn't SAP feel the necessity of having a CTO till March 2007?

Until the time when Shai left the company, our development was running between Shai and Peter Zenke. Peter was responsible for the recently launched SAP Business ByDesign and Shai was responsible for all other products.

At that time, there was no architectural integrity mechanism across the company and so, my previous position of the Head of Architecture was created in 2005. When Shai left, we realised that, in addition to that, there was a need to build and articulate the technology roadmap, for which we need a CTO.

What is your vision for SAP Labs in India?

It is very strategic for us because we don't do just development works, but we do a lot of innovation here. Our Business ByDesign product, that serves the mid-market segment, was largely built here. It is more about the expertise of the people here.

We have centres of gravity so that local decision-making can happen. We thought of making India a very effective piece of our overall development strategy, and it had been very successful.

What is driving the technology innovation within SAP?

The main lesson that not only SAP, but also broadly the IT industry has learnt, is that you have to manage the change together without affecting the core. Today, the customers simultaneously want the stability, reliability and a stable core. And they want innovation on top of that because they don't want to miss out on new things.

How is SAP going to address these issues?

We are the first one to come out with a solution which is a continuous innovation path to address the dilemma. We have already moved ERP to the stable core, and we will move the remaining applications in the suit to the stable core by next year.

Then, we will provide innovation on the top of that in some of these enhancement packages. The enhancement packages, which come twice a year, can be used as plug-ins on top of the stable core.

Stable core is basically the part of ERP that we keep stable, and we make sure that it does not change so that one can run his business reliably. The new functionalities, new capabilities and   even new technical capabilities will come on top of that with the enhancement packages.

Your decision to acquire Business Objects has not gone down well with analysts...

Whenever you look at a company of the size of SAP or Business Objects, you will find some overlap here and there. But we feel very comfortable that these are complementary products. They have built a set of tools and platforms components for business intelligence (BI) that are, by and large, complimentary to ours.

How important is architecture for an application-provider like SAP?

Architecture is a very fundamental thing for us due to the fact of long-life of our applications. If you have a suite on top of which other things are being built on, and this lives for 10-15 years, then architecture is very critical. Given our size now, it is very important to govern this centrally so that we never lose coherence.