SAP Appoints Vishal Sikka as Chief Technology Officer

by Shabana Khan

Sikka to Drive Technology Strategy and Architecture Road Map Leveraging Emerging Technologies

SAP AG today announced the appointment of Vishal Sikka as chief technology officer (CTO) to lead the company's technology and architecture strategy across its product portfolio. Effective April 2007, Sikka is responsible for ensuring a clear and harmonized road map for SAP products to deliver ongoing innovation and long-term value to customers worldwide. As CTO, Sikka leads the company's forward-thinking efforts around emerging technologies, plays a leading role in the long-term direction of SAP's research efforts and is chartered with mapping SAP's next-generation architecture. Reporting to SAP CEO Henning Kagermann, Sikka heads SAP's newly established Office of the CTO to drive these efforts.

"Vishal's successful track record inside and outside SAP clearly demonstrates his innovative and entrepreneurial spirit and alignment with SAP's approach of empowering customers with continuous innovation without business disruption," said Henning Kagermann, CEO, SAP AG. "In next generations of SAP's open, flexible architecture, customers will gain further cutting-edge technologies enabling them to transform their business networks and maximize relationships across borders with partners, suppliers and distributors. By establishing the Office of the CTO under Vishal's leadership, we are furthering our commitment to drive innovation at SAP and to help customers increase competitive advantage and accelerate innovation in their own businesses."

Sikka assumes the role of CTO after serving as senior vice president of architecture and chief software architect at SAP, responsible for the road map and direction of the architecture of SAP's products and infrastructure. Prior to this role, Sikka was the head of the Advanced Technology Group at SAP, with responsibility for strategic innovative projects. Before joining SAP, Sikka served as area vice president for platform technologies at Peregrine Systems, responsible for application development and integration technologies and architecture. He joined Peregrine following the acquisition of Bodha, Inc., which he founded and served as the company's chairman and CEO. Bodha developed technology for non-invasive, service-based integration of enterprise applications and for semantic information integration.

Sikka holds a doctorate in computer science from Stanford University and is based in the SAP office in Palo Alto, California.