SAP's resident entrepreneur

Shai Agassi, executive board member, is leading SAP toward a services-oriented architecture.

Shai Agassi doesn't remember the purpose of the first software program he coded, but he does remember sprinting to feed the punch card into the mainframe and watch it run. He was 7.

"I wasn't allowed into the punch-card area next to the big mainframe," Agassi says, recalling a computer science program for kids he attended at Israel's Tel Aviv University. "We had to run a mile to submit the program and get the results."

Less than three decades later, Agassi leads technology development strategy for Germany's SAP, the third-largest independent software supplier in the world. At 35, he's the youngest member of SAP's executive board. He's also one of only two non-Germans on that seven-member board.

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Shai Agassi doesn't remember the purpose of the first software program he coded, but he does remember sprinting to feed the punch card into the mainframe and watch it run. He was 7.

"I wasn't allowed into the punch-card area next to the big mainframe," Agassi says, recalling a computer science program for kids he attended at Israel's Tel Aviv University. "We had to run a mile to submit the program and get the results."

Less than three decades later, Agassi leads technology development strategy for Germany's SAP, the third-largest independent software supplier in the world. At 35, he's the youngest member of SAP's executive board. He's also one of only two non-Germans on that seven-member board.

His rise at SAP has been rapid. Agassi joined the company in 2001 when SAP paid $400 million for his corporate portal software company, TopTier Software - one of four technology companies Agassi founded in the 1990s after graduating with honors from Technion, the Israel Institute of Technology, with a bachelor's degree in computer science. Today Agassi oversees development of SAP's integration and application platform and co-leads the company's applications strategy team. He says he never expected to end up at a company as large as SAP, but he finds it a good fit. "The first year I was at SAP, I fell in love with the company," he says.

Observers have compared Agassi to Hasso Plattner, SAP's visionary. "Hasso Plattner was a very similar in his background and outlook. He was a programmer, a techie and someone who had a tremendous amount of business savvy," says Joshua Greenbaum, a principal at Enterprise Applications Consulting.

Agassi brushes off any suggestions that he is Plattner's heir apparent, deferring that role to SAP's current CEO, Henning Kagermann. "Those who've met Henning know, the guy's a genius," he says.

Agassi says he relishes the time he spent with Plattner, who relinquished his co-CEO title in March. "I had the greatest luck in the world to spend two-and-a-half years being mentored by Hasso," Agassi says. "Hasso would take me into a room and say, 'We're going to talk about 1993 and R3 right now.' That's a great lesson."

Selling infrastructure

Agassi is soft-spoken, but his ideas are grand. Take NetWeaver, the integration and application server middleware that SAP unveiled in January. All SAP business software eventually will run on this new platform - Agassi's brainchild.

"Agassi deserves most of the credit for having formulated and coalesced SAP's current technology strategy," Greenbaum says. "NetWeaver is his baby."

NetWeaver represents a big shift for SAP; with it, the software company for the first time will be trying to sell infrastructure along with its core business applications. This bold strategy pits SAP against infrastructure stalwarts. "SAP won't say it, but it clearly is on a war path to compete head to head with IBM, Microsoft and other infrastructure providers of the world," says Eric Austvold, research director at AMR Research.