SAP CTO on Innovation And Cloud Computing

As the CTO of SAP, Vishal Sikka's job is to figure out what SAP's future applications will look, feel and act like for its customers. He does that by experimenting with untested, emerging technologies; innovating with his team and co-innovating with customers and partners; and developing new ways to think about enterprise architecture and governance mechanisms.

To him, the goal of his work is to provide clarity when customers see complexity, application harmony instead of integration challenges, and easy-to-follow roadmaps that offer direction at unfamiliar forks in the road.

That's no small task. Traditional on-premise ERP vendors such as SAP are under attack from smaller software-as-a-service (SaaS) and on-demand vendors. The value of maintenance fees is being questioned like never before. And the buzz around next-gen cloud-computing offerings has also cast gray skies over SAP's established business model.

[[ For more on Business ByDesign, see "SAP's Business ByDesign: A Riddle, Wrapped in a Mystery, Inside an Enigma." For more SAP innovation, see "Innovation Dreaming Won't Stop Enterprise Software Screaming." ]]

In fact, SAP has been poked and prodded over its much hyped and much delayed Business ByDesign offering-its suite of on-demand applications for the SMB. With the analytic mind of a computer scientist (which he is, holding a doctoral degree in C.S. from Stanford), Sikka takes umbrage at SaaS vendors propagating cloud computing platforms that are not technically accurate.

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