SAP’s Product & Technology Committee: Time to Hit The Refresh Button

 

The new 'Technology' committee

SAP has long relied on a technically rigorous governance structure to steer its evolution—from monolithic ERP to cloud-native business software. For years, the Technology and Strategy Committee, under co-founder Hasso Plattner’s leadership, focused deeply on product architecture, platform infrastructure, and security.

Now, that committee has evolved. It’s been renamed the Product and Technology Committee, and it carries a broader mandate: not only core product and platform strategy, but also go-to-market execution.

The current external members bring impressive depth:

• Aicha Evans (Chair), former CEO of Zoox and Intel executive
• Ralf Herbrich, machine learning expert and former Amazon exec
• Qi Lu, former COO of Baidu and President of Microsoft’s Applications & Services Group
• Gerhard Oswald, SAP veteran with deep operational experience

This is a high-caliber group. But the timing is just as important as the talent. SAP is at a crossroads.

What seems to be missing

Looking at SAP’s public disclosures over the past five years, including supervisory board reporting, one pattern stands out: the prior committee structure placed strong emphasis on internal technical evolution—HANA, security, cloud transition—but paid less visible attention to emerging external realities.

Several topics seem conspicuously absent from formal oversight:

• Platform ecosystem strategy: Can SAP become a destination for third-party innovation, like Salesforce or ServiceNow?
• AI and data governance: How will SAP embed responsible, enterprise-grade AI across its stack—and differentiate from hyperscalers?
• Customer success and retention metrics: Is post-sales value realization part of product and GTM feedback loops?
• Modularization and composable ERP: Are products flexible enough to meet the speed and specificity modern enterprises demand?
• Developer experience: How attractive is the SAP cloud to next-generation builders and ISVs?

These aren’t edge topics. They are central to SAP’s competitiveness in the cloud software world. And if they’re not getting board-level focus, they may be slipping between strategy and execution.

Three key questions

With a restructured Product and Technology Committee in place and a new generation of leadership around the table, now is the time to reset the agenda—and ensure that governance is keeping pace with strategic reality.

Here are three guiding questions that should shape the committee’s work going forward:

1. Is SAP building a platform—or just a portfolio?

To win the cloud, SAP must compete not only on application depth, but on extensibility, developer love, and ecosystem pull. The platform story matters more than ever.

2. Are product and GTM aligned on customer value?

As cloud revenue becomes subscription-driven, long-term success depends on usage, expansion, and customer outcomes. Product, sales, and post-sales functions must act as one.

3. Is the oversight model built for the next decade?

Today’s committee has strong individual expertise—but does it collectively reflect the skills needed to lead in AI governance, SaaS GTM, developer strategy, and platform monetization?

Final Thought

SAP has the scale, trust, and global reach to lead in the next generation of enterprise software. But leadership in this new era won’t come from product depth alone. It will come from how product, platform, and go-to-market converge—and how clearly that convergence is governed at the top.

The new Product and Technology Committee can play that role. Now is the time to lean in.

This article was first published on LinkedIn on April 15, 2025.