The fact that finding a successor for Hasso Plattner at SAP was no child's play was evident even before the choice fell on former Deloitte CEO Punit Renjen. Nor could it have come as a surprise, as filling the shoes of the SAP founder is undoubtedly a daunting task. The rather laborious and prolonged search for a chairman for Europe's largest software company left a bitter taste of a makeshift solution for some investors.

In hindsight, Renjen probably this assessment was close to the truth. It was to be expected that a former consultant would accompany SAP more from a customer and sales perspective. He lacked genuine technology expertise, a deficiency that must have stood out all the more, given that a manager of American influence would likely struggle with the legally entrenched division of roles between the management board and supervisory board in Germany.

Now, Hasso Plattner himself is undoubtedly the last person who would advocate for strict non-interference of the chairman of the supervisory board in the strategic matters of the company. He likely never adhered to that, instead setting the impulses he deemed necessary. What he considered particularly necessary was revealed by the departing SAP founder in a recent newspaper interview. The fact that the American Jennifer Morgan had such a short stint as Co-CEO was mainly because she wanted to put technology innovations in software on the back burner and turn SAP into a kind of sales machine. From Plattner's perspective, this would have been "the end of SAP". Therefore, he pulled the plug.

Now, he has done so again. The abrupt action of dropping Renjen just before the annual general meeting and instead promoting former Nokia CEO Pekka Ala-Pietilä suggests that technology expertise also played a role in this decision. The Finn was a crucial figure in the rise of the Finnish technology icon to the former world leader in mobile phones. With his expertise in artificial intelligence, he addresses a central theme of the future.

However, SAP will now have to use the weeks before the annual general meeting for intensive investor dialogue, mainly to convince American investors of the ad-hoc swap. The balance in the power structure between the European and American perspectives has been a challenge for SAP for many years.