Interview: Oliver Bussmann, CIO, SAP

Exploring the business potential of emerging technologies and anticipating future advances is all in a day's work for SAP IT supremo Oliver Bussmann, writes Dawinderpal Sahota

SAP’s Oliver Bussmann has been in the IT game for over 20 years, but like many enterprise CIOs, he had no idea when embarking on a business degree, that IT would become such a significant part of his career.

Bussmann studied business administration at the University of Münster in Germany and first experienced IT when, as part of his course, he had to garner some work experience. He was presented with an opportunity from IBM.

“I was looking for an internship and one of my professors said to me: ‘Oliver, why not apply for an internship at IBM?’” he recalls.

He applied, and was offered a role focused on the financial services industry. When he finished his degree, Bussmannn was invited to join IBM’s sales and services division.

“I was not 100 per cent into IT, but my experience as an intern helped me learn more about it. I was never really a technical programmer though.”

He said that working for IBM gave him a solid foundation in both project work and programming. During his seven-year tenure, he was tasked with engaging and working with new customers, as well as understanding new trends.

“So I got this great foundation in doing IT business, over three or four years in different environments. I learned the entire landscape of IT.”

His next step was to work for Deutsche Bank, on the client side of the financial services industry. He became the head of Deutsche Bank’s private banking IT business and was responsible for driving the firm’s global application development.

After three years, Bussmann joined Allianz in North America, his first experience of working and living outside Germany.

“That was when I began to better understand cultures other than German. I ran the asset management company out of the US there for three years before moving back to the Allianz head office in Germany to run the entire global IT business.”

Bussmann began working for SAP at the beginning of last year, having been attracted by its fast-paced innovation, as well as the idea of being the first user of new technologies.

He says that as the CIO of SAP, he has to stay ahead of the curve and explore new technologies, to determine how the firm’s own solutions fit into the evolving technological landscape.

“At SAP, you have to be the first to market. That’s a major change from what I had done before. Working in financial services does require innovation, but you’re not necessarily the first to develop a technology.”

However, this is no mean feat; there are many challenges associated with being a pioneer, not least the fact that there are not always the resources in-house to support development of all the technologies, and there is always pressure from the business to go live with new solutions as soon as possible.

To overcome these challenges, Bussmann put together a 100-day plan outlining how he would approach the role.

“My first step was to understand what the business needs were, come to an understanding of how the IT department is perceived within the business, what had to be done and what the main priorities were. And then it was all about engaging the business to work on major topics.”

Enhancing communication was critical to marrying business and IT needs, and he worked to increase the level of communication by pioneering social media within SAP.

“We have a Twitter-like tool internally, blogs, video chat and video blogs. And we started a series on SAP TV, SAP’s video site, demonstrating how we run SAP software at SAP. So I was utilising social media from the first day of the job – within two weeks I had started my first blog. This was critical to my reaching out to the employees and the customers,” he says.

Interview: Oliver Bussmann, CIO, SAP

Exploring the business potential of emerging technologies and anticipating future advances is all in a day's work for SAP IT supremo Oliver Bussmann, writes Dawinderpal Sahota

He believes that embracing Web 2.0 and social media is absolutely essential to being a CIO and says that it can be very powerful. As an example, he cites the fact that the news that SAP is undertaking a mass deployment of iPads across the organisation stemmed from a single tweet on Twitter.

SAP has rolled out almost 1,500 iPads for users across its business, with email access, access to a virtual private network (VPN), Citrix software to enable access to server-based applications and business intelligence tools via BusinessObjects.

“That was an important message that I posted on Twitter, somebody grabbed it and now it’s an important topic,” says Bussmann.

HANA Project
Another initiative that Bussmann hopes will see the rest of the IT world following suit is SAP’s High-performance Analytic Appliance (HANA) project, which involves compressing a huge amount of data into a dedicated server to run analytics.

“HANA helps us to load our data out of the business warehouse into the memory of a dedicated server with 4TB of memory,” he explains. “So the software helps us to utilise the business data from our warehouses, compress it with a compression factor of 10, and then move it to and manage it from the main memory.”

He adds that this will allow SAP to run analytical queries and tools over the data in real time as opposed to days, which was how long it used to take.

Bussmann hopes that the project will help bring business and data knowledge into SAP’s product development and help the firm work out, through testing various scenarios, which application areas this kind of technology suits.

Bussmann said the project is in many ways a showcase for other businesses. SAP will be piloting the technology in Las Vegas and Shanghai, followed by a demonstration to other businesses showing how SAP created HANA. Once the pilot is complete, Bussmann hopes to move the project forward by integrating it with new technologies.

“I think we can expect more in the future; the first step is the analytics, the second step is further integration with our ERP business. We also want to be utilising this kind of technology for the transactional business on the mobile side as well.”

On demand, on premises and on device
SAP is keen to focus on different modes of deployment, according to Bussmann. “We believe that the combination of on demand, on premises and on device is the future for the CIO. The CIO has to orchestrate all three environments,” he says.

He adds that the onus is on SAP to create more hybrid applications and says that he is working with the firm’s development teams to create a different attitude towards software development. Deploying the iPad is an example of shifting to a mobile mindset, he says, as new technologies in employees’ personal lives evolve expectations in their work lives.

“The iPad is, for us, the door into the enterprise mobile business. There will be more devices on Android and on the BlackBerry side that we will support. Being device-agnostic is another challenge for the CIO,” says Bussmann.

“This is not just a one-time move with Apple. Google Android or BlackBerry will come up with beautiful devices and our job is to integrate them and put our software on that. So although we have the foundation in place with the iPad, we will be putting more business analytics software on other devices.”