sap
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Navdeep Singla and the last few feet of enterprise software
A factory basement with no signal makes a useful test of a technology company. Navdeep Singla has spent his career bringing SAP closer to the people doing the work.
Frederic Laluyaux and the Decision That Wouldn’t Go Away
A Paris startup taught him how quickly technology can erase a business. After SAP and Anaplan, Frederic Laluyaux built Aera around a question that kept returning: why do companies have so much information and still take so long to act?
Tomer Shiran and the Homework Problem That Followed Him to Work
His daughter could get an answer about the solar system in seconds. Tomer Shiran wanted the same ordinary convenience for people trying to understand their own company’s data.
Manish Sood and the trouble with being early
In 2011, Manish Sood put his savings behind a cloud data company that some customers could scarcely imagine buying. Fifteen years later, Reltio belongs to SAP, and his old question has acquired a new urgency: can a business trust what it knows?
Dietmar Hopp and the curious economics of staying home
He helped turn five IBM colleagues into SAP. Then Dietmar Hopp used the proceeds to change the place he came from - one football club, school programme and public playground at a time.
Tijl Vuyk and the Art of Making Work Disappear
He founded Redwood Software in 1993 and spent decades asking why people were still doing the same tasks twice. His answer became a business built around the work most of us would rather forget.
Sanish Mondkar and the problem hiding in the coffee queue
After leading product teams at Ariba and SAP, Sanish Mondkar went looking at hourly work from the other side of the counter. The result was Legion, built around a deceptively difficult question: can a better schedule serve the business and the person working it?
Maran Nagarajan and the long way home
Four college friends came back to Tamil Nadu to build a company. For KaarTech’s Maran Nagarajan, the harder journey was learning how to make it last.
Michael DiGiandomenico Has Spent 30 Years Asking What Comes Next
Before he ran Savantis, Michael DiGiandomenico learned enterprise change from nearly every seat at the table - finance, delivery, consulting and operations. His career is a study in the unglamorous art of choosing the right road before anyone starts driving.
John Schwarz Left the Tower for a Hot Townhouse
After 35 years inside enterprise software's established institutions, John Schwarz started again in a rented Vancouver townhouse. The wager was simple: business data should answer a question before the questioner loses patience.
Priya Sathiyam Wants the Future to Pass the Child Test
She began in software, discovered design at 25, and has spent the years since teaching companies, children, and AI teams to notice the people behind the interface.
Don Bulmer Has Spent a Career Making Complexity Make Sense
From a tiny California zoo to SAP, Shell, AWS, Veeva and Reltio, his work keeps returning to one stubborn problem: how to turn institutional complexity into a story people can use.
Alison Biggan Makes Enterprise Marketing Answer to the Numbers
A sports marketer took one consequential referral into enterprise software, then learned to make brand, pipeline and trust speak the same language. At Boomi, Alison Biggan is applying that operating discipline to the noisy promise of AI.
Dan Adika Built a GPS for Work - Then Sold the Map to SAP
WalkMe began with a modest question: why should people have to memorize software? Fourteen years, a public listing and a $1.5 billion SAP deal later, Dan Adika is still working on the same stubborn gap between what technology can do and what people actually get done.
Priya Vijayarajendran Is Going Back to the Work
After leading ASAPP from the technology seat to the CEO’s office, Priya Vijayarajendran is returning to the identity that has followed her through SAP, IBM and Microsoft: a builder who wants enterprise AI to survive contact with reality.
Mala Anand
Mala Anand is Executive Vice President and Chief Customer Experience Officer at Microsoft, leading the Customer Experience & Success division. A 25-year technology veteran who immigrated from Mumbai at 17 on a Rotary Youth Exchange Scholarship, she has shaped enterprise software at Cisco, SAP, and Microsoft, driving AI-powered transformations that measurably improve how customers get support. She is also executive sponsor of Women at Microsoft and an independent board director at Agilent Technologies.
Gabie Boko Learned Marketing in the Wild
The NetApp CMO grew up in Alaska, almost became a lawyer, and now runs marketing for a company that stores the world's data. Her rule: find the moments that matter, then bet big on them.
Beth Thomas
For twenty years Beth Thomas has built demand engines for companies most people never see - the supply chain software and consulting firms that quietly run the back office of everyone else's business.
Andres Carranza
Andres Carranza is the co-founder and CEO of Luzid, a San Francisco startup building David, an agentic AI copilot that orchestrates SAP and Salesforce implementations. A Stanford dropout and former AI researcher, he interned at NASA, Harvard, MIT and was the youngest quantitative trader in Two Sigma's history before leaving school to build a company that aims to turn months-long enterprise software rollouts into something closer to a software update.
Emma Qian
Emma Qian is the co-founder and CEO of Nova Intelligence, a San Francisco startup building an agentic AI platform that analyzes, modernizes, and generates custom code for SAP systems. A former research engineer at Google DeepMind and software engineer at Meta AI, Caltech-trained Qian left frontier AI research to attack one of enterprise software's least glamorous and most expensive problems: the migration of decades of custom SAP code to S/4HANA. Nova has raised over $40 million, including a $31.5 million Series A led by Chemistry with backing from Accel, Conviction, and SAP.io, and counts customers like Festo who report working roughly five times faster. She is a Forbes 30 Under 30 honoree.
Peter Russo
Peter Russo is VP of Core Business Workflows, Product & Solution Marketing at ServiceNow, where he leads go-to-market strategy for the platform's finance, supply chain, and creator workflow product lines. A seasoned technology marketing executive with roots in SAP and Oracle, he has spent his career helping enterprise software companies articulate the value of complex platforms to buyers who care about outcomes, not features. Based in Austin, TX, he is known in the industry for championing the 'beyond ERP' narrative and for helping ServiceNow stake its claim in the mid-market with the 2025 Core Business Suite launch.
Sanjay Poonen
Sanjay Poonen is the CEO and President of Cohesity, the data security and management company that absorbed Veritas' enterprise backup business in late 2024 to become the largest data protection vendor in the world. A Dartmouth-Stanford-Harvard alumnus who arrived in Boston at 18 with fifty dollars, he previously helped double revenues at both SAP (from ~$10B to ~$20B) and VMware (from ~$6B to ~$12B), where as COO he architected the landmark VMware-AWS partnership and the AirWatch acquisition.
Gadi Shamia
Gadi Shamia is the CEO and co-founder of Replicant, a voice AI platform that automates customer service calls at enterprise scale. A serial entrepreneur who sold his first company (TopManage) to SAP, helped EchoSign sell to Adobe for $400M, and scaled Talkdesk from seed to unicorn as COO, he brings two decades of building and scaling B2B software companies to the challenge of replacing traditional IVR systems with natural-sounding, AI-driven conversations. Under his leadership, Replicant has automated over 1 billion minutes of customer interactions and raised $113M in funding.
Jasvir Gill
Jasvir Gill is the Founder and CEO of AlertEnterprise, a Fremont-based enterprise SaaS platform that converges physical security, cybersecurity, and identity governance through AI. A serial entrepreneur who immigrated from Punjab in 1985, Gill previously founded Virsa Systems — a pioneer in governance, risk, and compliance software — which was acquired by SAP in 2006. He then built the SAP GRC business unit before leaving to found AlertEnterprise in 2007. Backed by Kleiner Perkins, the company has become an industry leader in cyber-physical security convergence, deploying AI-powered access control and identity management for critical infrastructure, utilities, and enterprise clients worldwide.
Zain Aziz
Zain Aziz is the Founder and CEO of Atom, a San Francisco-based enterprise cloud and digital transformation company. A former Marine and Harvard alumnus, he built Atom in 2020 to tackle the gap between how people live and how enterprises work - delivering cloud transformations across HR, Finance, Sales, and Supply Chain in 26 weeks or less. Atom has raised $15.8M in total funding, including a $6.8M Series A in October 2022, and serves clients ranging from startups to Fortune 500 companies across 6 continents with ~220 employees.
Bill McDermott
Bill McDermott is the Chairman and CEO of ServiceNow, the enterprise cloud platform company serving nearly 90% of the Fortune 500. After 17 years at Xerox and 17 more at SAP - where he grew market cap from $39 billion to over $156 billion as its first American-born CEO - he joined ServiceNow in 2019 and has since tripled revenues, crossing $10 billion without a single acquisition of revenue or round of layoffs. A self-made entrepreneur who bought a deli at 16, he distills his philosophy into one word: trust.
Deepak Nagpal
Deepak Nagpal is the CEO of Audax Labs, a Bothell, Washington-based technology innovation company he has led since 2016. With a career spanning over two decades across NTT DATA, Capital One, and Interra Information Technologies, and an MBA from Oxford's Said Business School, he has built Audax Labs into a multi-practice consultancy operating across AR/VR/MR, AI, IoT, cloud migration, and data analytics - serving industries from automotive and healthcare to BFSI and government, with partnerships spanning Microsoft, Google, Amazon AWS, Hitachi Vantara, Oracle, and Rocket Software.
Jigish Shah
Jigish Shah is the Executive Chairman of ArchLynk, a global digital supply chain consulting firm headquartered in San Jose, California. He co-founded Krypt in 2008 and built it into an eminent player in the SAP Supply Chain ecosystem over 14 years before orchestrating its 2022 merger with Novigo to create ArchLynk - backed by BV Investment Partners. Under his leadership as CEO, ArchLynk further acquired WCS Consulting in 2023 and grew to approximately 350 employees with $35M in annual revenue, establishing itself as an SAP Gold Partner serving enterprises across 4 continents with expertise in SAP Transportation Management, Integrated Business Planning, Global Trade Services, and AI/ML-driven supply chain solutions.
Adaire Fox-Martin
Adaire Fox-Martin is CEO and President of Equinix, the world's largest data-center company. A Trinity College Dublin graduate who once taught school in Ireland, she spent 18 years at Oracle, 14 at SAP, and three at Google Cloud before taking the top job at Equinix in 2024. She runs 280 data centers across 77 markets and calls the internet 'the fourth utility'.
Akhil Khera
Akhil Khera is the CEO and President of Tranzeal Incorporated, a San Jose-based global business transformation and IT services firm. He has led Tranzeal since 2011 and also serves as CEO and Chairman of Khera Ventures, Inc.