The business story
Born 21 January 1944 in Berlin. In 1972 co-founded SAP with four other former IBM engineers (Dietmar Hopp, Klaus Tschira, Hans-Werner Hector, Claus Wellenreuther). A driving technical and strategic force, he helped build SAP into the world’s largest enterprise-software (ERP) company and Germany’s most valuable technology firm, and chaired its supervisory board for many years, stepping down in 2024. Founded the Hasso Plattner Institute in Potsdam, owns the NHL’s San Jose Sharks, is a major philanthropist, and is among Germany’s wealthiest people.
Plattner's approach reflects a preference for depth and endurance over visibility.
Before SAP
Hasso Plattner was born in Berlin on 21 January 1944, in the last year of the Second World War, into a country about to be divided and rebuilt. He trained as an engineer and, like many capable technologists of his generation, joined IBM, which at the time effectively set the terms of business computing.
IBM gave him and several colleagues a detailed view of how large companies used software, and of what was missing. Businesses typically commissioned separate, custom programs for each function, one for accounting, another for inventory, another for payroll, and those systems were rebuilt for each customer and often processed data in overnight batches.
Building SAP
In 1972 Plattner left IBM with four other engineers, Dietmar Hopp, Klaus Tschira, Hans-Werner Hector and Claus Wellenreuther, to found SAP. Their premise was that business software could be standardised, sold to many companies and configured for each, with an organisation's functions sharing one body of data that updated in real time.
That premise grew into enterprise resource planning, the category of software that runs finance, procurement, manufacturing, supply chain and human resources on a single system. SAP became the largest enterprise-software company in the world and Germany's most valuable technology firm, and its products came to sit beneath the operations of a large share of the world's biggest organisations.
The economics were durable. Once a large company had built its core processes on SAP, replacing the system was so risky and disruptive that customers tended to stay for decades. Plattner remained a leading technical and strategic voice throughout, then chaired SAP's supervisory board for many years before stepping down in 2024, more than fifty years after the founding.
