Dive Brief:
- SAP’s supervisory board extended the contract of CEO and Executive Board Chairman Christian Klein and CFO Dominik Asam by two years, the company said in a Monday announcement.
- Klein’s two-year extension will keep him at the helm through April 2030, the year support services for SAP's on-premises ERP Central Component systems are due to sunset for most customers. Asam, who is also on the executive board, had his contract extended through March 2028.
- The two executives were pivotal in a $2.18 billion restructuring journey aimed at driving customers to cloud-based ERP and embedding AI capabilities across its cloud-based enterprise suite. “Christian Klein and Dominik Asam, together with the executive team, have played an instrumental role in SAP’s ongoing success, providing steady leadership throughout the company’s transformation journey,” Pekka Ala-Pietilä, chairman of SAP’s supervisory board, said in the announcement.
Dive Insight:
SAP tied its fortunes to the cloud over a decade ago and ramped up migration efforts under Klein’s tenure as CEO, which began in 2020.
The company extended the deadline for ECC mainstream support by two years to 2027 the year of Klein’s CEO appointment and launched the RISE with SAP migration incentive program a year later. While SAP stood firm on ending extended support services for on-premises ERP in 2030, it will provide business continuity support to customers committed to the RISE program for an additional three years, Klein said during a January earnings call.
“It's not about the extension of on-premises maintenance,” Klein said. “It’s really reaching with a helping hand to a very few large customers who need this offering to fully transform and migrate to the cloud.”
The company added migration credits to the RISE with SAP program and expanded technical support services last year, promising a dedicated enterprise architect to ease each customer’s journey to cloud last year. SAP also moved fast to deploy automated generative AI agents in an effort to “supercharge” its Joule AI assistant, Klein said in October.
The marriage of cloud and AI paid off during the first three months of the year. SAP increased cloud-based product revenues 27% year over year to nearly $6 billion. Cloud ERP accounted for 85% of the segment’s revenues, Asam said last month, during the company’s Q1 2025 earnings call.
A major leadership change is unlikely given the size of the challenges SAP faces, according to Forrester Senior Analyst Akshara Naik Lopez. "SAP has a major task ahead of itself in staying committed to its long-term strategy of converting its massive on-prem customer base to Cloud ERP," she said in an email.
SAP has also expanded its customer base through the GROW with SAP program to support new ERP deployments. Roughly two-thirds of the company’s Q1 deals were new customers signed through the GROW offering, Klein said during the April earnings call.
“Klein has taken aggressive measures to rationalize the operating cost basis for SAP through restructuring actions coupled with a laser-like focus on the product/suite portfolio, driving the customers to their RISE and GROW cloud-based business models,” said Scott Bickley, advisory fellow at Info-Tech Research Group, in an email to CIO Dive.
“The board at SAP is clearly pleased with his performance,” Bickley added.
