After accident, SAP CEO returns to make the Internet smarter
Bill McDermott says rather than treat it as a tragedy, it only made him ‘more self-empowering ’
When SAP CEO Bill McDermott tumbled down a flight of stairs while carrying a glass, blinding his left eye, everything was slow motion as he felt the “edge of life.”
“My eye was cut in half,” McDermott said of the 2015 accident at his brother’s home that has required 13 surgeries. “It required thousands of stitches to put it back together.”
Two years later, he replays the incident in his mind and mulls if he could take it all back.
“No. It has only made me better, more self-empowering,” he reflects in a board room at a luxury hotel here. “I appreciate every moment, on a deeper emotional level. I have a calmness ... of mind and will.”
McDermott, 56, leads the world’s third-largest software company (No. 178 on the Forbes’ ranking of largest public companies). Its cloud-computing technology reaches 130 million mobile users, and it has partnered with Facebook, Google, Microsoft and Amazon — Internet and PC giants that are far more familiar to most consumers.
Behind the scenes, SAP has been shifting from a reliance on big-ticket software sales to one deeply invested in wrangling large-scale data to make companies smarter. And it has been growing: The behemoth’s market value has increased from $39 billion — when McDermott became co-CEO — to $135 billion today. (McDermott was named sole CEO in 2014.)
It’s partnering with companies to bring innovations such as blockchain, machine learning, artificial intelligence and the Internet of Things to the business world. In short, “enterprise is the new black” has become a slogan at SAP.
“HANA (an on-premise or cloud database) became a multibillion-dollar industry,” says McDermott, who got his start in business buying a deli in Amityville, N.Y., at age 16. “We had big dreams about it (when it debuted in 2010), and we’re just getting started.”
Only Microsoft and Oracle sell more software annually than SAP, which rang up $23.4 billion in revenue in 2016.
Of course, the tricky task for a global leviathan such as SAP, which employs 87,000 in more than 180 countries, is shaping its technology to meet the demands of customers for AI, big data and the cloud, says Holger Mueller, principal analyst at Constellation Research.
“You only learn one customer at a time and need to extract the commonality for best practices, then build that product and make it a successful product,” Mueller says. “Move too early — it doesn’t fit. Move too late, and others are there earlier and take customers.”
SAP is based in Heidelberg, Germany, and is best known as a purveyor of business software. That might explain McDermott’s relative anonymity in a field dominated by the Tim Cooks, Mark Zuckerbergs and Larry Ellisons of the tech world.
Ellison’s Oracle is still a bitter rival, a holdover from an earlier, pre-Internet Silicon Valley. Now, both are fighting hard for cloud- related sales.
A recent surge in cloud-applications revenue by Oracle — it said cloud-related revenue soared 51% to $1.5 billion in its fiscal first quarter ended Aug. 31 — make it a legitimate threat to SAP as the world’s top seller of enterprise applications.
But McDermott is loathe to engage in the trash talk that epitomized the long-running rivalry. In the late 1990s, Ellison — whose Oracle Team USA won the America’s Cup in 2010 and 2013 — and then SAP co-founder Hasso Plattner famously dueled in their private high tech yachts for bragging rights.
“I try not to get obsessed with them,” McDermott says. “That’s the past. We stay away from comparisons.”
McDermott, who has been CEO since 2010, personifies a less-is-more philosophy. His message is simple: Make it easier for corporate customers such as Under Armour, ConAgra Foods and the NBA to simplify their technical operations and improve efficiency.
The benefits of real-time data in a digital-rich business environment is highlighted in a “Run simple” TV ad campaign featur- ing British actor Clive Owen scheduled to debut in three weeks. McDermott shared the one-minute ad with USA TODAY.
“When Leonardo Da Vinci said that simplicity is the ultimate sophistication, he didn’t mean doing simple things,” McDermott says.
“I think he meant doing complicated things simply.”
Fittingly, SAP Leonardo is the company’s latest technology platform that integrates machine learning, IoT, blockchain, analytics and big data into one intelligent system that runs in the cloud, SAP says.
“In tech, with the quicker and quicker product cycles, one does not move slowly or they die quickly,” McDermott says.
And the accident certainly didn’t disrupt the 6-foot-2 McDermott’s basketball skills. His grandfather, Bobby McDermott, is a member of the Naismith Memorial Basketball Hall of Fame.
“I still play full-court basketball, and better now,” McDermott says, beaming.
“I shoot better because of concentration, and I am physically stronger with more stamina. I’m a very lucky guy.”
“I appreciate every moment, on a deeper emotional level. I have a calmness ... of mind and will.”
SAP CEO Bill McDermott