Yusuf is Responsible for Leading the World’s Largest Enterprise Software Company

Yusuf is Responsible for Leading the World’s Largest Enterprise Software Company in Developing Partnerships and Processes for its Software Platform


PALO ALTO, Calif. - March 28, 2006 - SAP AG (NYSE: SAP) today announced the appointment of Zia Yusuf as executive vice president to lead the platform ecosystem development efforts for the company. Yusuf is chartered with continuing to build an open ecosystem, based on an industry standard design led by SAP to provide value to customers, partners and SAP through co-innovation. Based at the company’s Palo Alto offices, he will report to Shai Agassi, president of the Product Technology Group and executive board member of SAP.

“The successful track record that Zia has demonstrated at SAP as head of the global corporate strategy group and his ability to drive strategic, competitive and operational topics provides him with the unique insight and knowledge of external market forces to lead internal execution of the platform partnering model,” said Agassi. “SAP has built a strong ecosystem of more than 360,000 members in our SAP Developer Network, including more than 1,000 independent software vendors building software for the SAP NetWeaver® platform, and much of the credit goes to the ecosystem team led by George Paolini. During the past few years, SAP has invested a tremendous amount in creating a world-class partner community and we’ve been extremely successful. I want to thank George for the foundation he has laid and now Zia is tasked with taking our already successful program to the next level to provide sustained progress for SAP and our partners for years to come.”

Yusuf assumes the leadership of the Platform Ecosystem unit after leading the company’s Corporate Consulting Team, the Corporate Strategy Management team and the Design Services team, all of which report to SAP CEO Henning Kagermann. Prior to managing these strategy organizations, Yusuf played a key role in the founding of SAP Markets, Inc., the business-to-business marketplace company of SAP, where he served as its vice president and chief operating officer. As SAP Markets expanded globally, Yusuf was appointed as managing director to lead SAP Markets into the Asia-Pacific region.

“Today SAP’s ecosystem has a solid foundation for co-innovation and the SAP NetWeaver platform is the focal point that enables our partners’ ideas and applications to flourish,” said Yusuf. “No longer is it possible for a single vendor to be all things to all customers. Our partners are critical to SAP’s strategy and I look forward to maintaining a regular dialog with our partners about what their needs are and at the same time sharing with them the direction in which SAP is heading, so that both sides can be as successful as possible.”