The end of an era always marks a new beginning: the old is over, something new must come. Punit Renjen, the designated new chairman of SAP's supervisory board, made this clear at the Annual General Meeting with the simple sentence: "I am not Hasso Plattner." And: He will not even try to be like Hasso Plattner.
The American with Indian roots, long head of Deloitte, a consulting group with more than 400,000 employees, left no doubt in his short introductory speech in Mannheim, he knows what he wants: to break new ground, in case of doubt even away from the great footsteps of Hasso Plattner.
It will be interesting to see how the duo of alpha males get along in the last Plattner year and whether the harmony is still there when the SAP father father is finally handed over the scepter next year as planned at the age of almost 80. In any case, it is good if the only German IT group of world renown can start its restart with a strong supervisor. So it should come as no surprise that there will be frictional losses.