SAP has long been an unusual European star. They have not only managed to achieve continued growth but also to withstand their aggressive rival Oracle by stealing customers from its acquisitions Peoplesoft and Siebel. Also, unlike anyone I know of in Europe, SAP manages to forge partnerships with rivals in some territories while competing in others (e.g. IBM is SAP's biggest business partner internationally while heavily competing for ERP consulting jobs in Germany). The other example is Oracle itself, with whom they always had to work together interfacing to its database while at the same time Oracle was pushing hard into the ERP business and using all imaginable (often unethical) business practices to win deals.

Now SAP showed again that it is up to fast-paced competitive global market challenges announcing a plan on how they intend to double their market cap by 2010. This would mean a growth from 43 bln EUR to 86 bln EUR in just 5 years. To make sure their employees are motivated, unusually high incentives have been granted to the board and the first and second tier management, totalling 300 million EUR. Initiator has been once again the man who started it all: Hasso Plattner. Half of the growth SAP wants to achieve with new SME customers, while the other should come from its new development platform Netweaver.