Hasso Plattner (born 21 January 1944) is a German businessman. A co-founder of SAP SE software company, he has been chairman of the supervisory board of SAP SE since May 2003. As of August 2020, ''

Forbes ''Forbes'' () is an American business magazine owned by Integrated Whale Media Investments and the Forbes family. Published eight times a year, it features articles on finance, industry, investing, and marketing topics. ''Forbes'' also r ...

'' reported that he possessed a net worth of US$17.9 billion.

Early life

Plattner was born to German ophthalmologist Horst Plattner (1918-2001) and his wife shortly before the end of the Second World War, in Berlin. He grew up in Bavaria.

Career

Plattner set up SAP with four co-founders in 1972. He stepped down as co-chief executive in 2003 at age 60. He has since been serving as chairman of the company's supervisory board and played an influential role in the company's governance, orchestrating the hiring of co-CEOs Jennifer Morgan and Christian Klein in 2019. He has reduced his stake in SAP several times; as of 2020, he owned a 5.89% stake, making him the company's largest individual shareholder. In 1998, Plattner founded the non-profit Hasso Plattner Institute. He is Chair of Enterprise Platform and Integration Concepts and Professor of Enterprise Systems at HPI. In 2005, Plattner set up his own

venture capital fund Venture capital (often abbreviated as VC) is a form of private equity financing that is provided by venture capital firms or funds to startups, early-stage, and emerging companies that have been deemed to have high growth potential or which hav ...

, Hasso Plattner Ventures, with more than 25 million euros. By December 2009, HPV managed €150 million and had 17 companies in its portfolio, including online cruise portals Dreamlines. An affiliate fund, HPV Africa in Cape Town, was founded in 2008 with €29 million, and soon invested in five companies. Plattner provides the lion's share of this investment capital. In September 2010, HPV invested $6 million in Israeli software company Panaya in exchange for the company's stakes.

Sporting interests

In 2005, Plattner's maxZ86

maxi yacht A maxi yacht usually refers to a racing yacht of at least in length. Origin The term ''maxi'' originated with the International Offshore Rule (IOR) rating system, which in the 1970s and 1980s measured offshore racing yachts and applied a single ...

set a record at the

Transpacific Yacht Race The Transpacific Yacht Race (Transpac) is a biennial offshore yacht race held in odd-numbered years starting off the Pt. Fermin buoy in San Pedro, California and ending off Diamond Head in Hawaii, a distance of around . In even-numbered years the P ...

and was the scratch boat when it led a five-boat assault on the record for monohulls. She finished the race in 6 days, 16 hours, 4 minutes, and 11 seconds to win "the Barn Door" trophy, a slab of carved koa wood traditionally awarded to the monohull with the fastest elapsed time. Plattner is a keen golfer. He owns the Fancourt Golf Estate, which has three

Gary Player Gary James Player DMS, OIG (born 1 November 1935) is a South African retired professional golfer who is widely considered to be one of the greatest golfers of all time. During his career, Player won nine major championships on the regular tou ...

-designed championship courses, in addition to the CordeValle Golf Club in San Martin, California. The Links of Fancourt staged the 2003

Presidents Cup The Presidents Cup is a series of men's golf matches between a team representing the United States and an International Team representing the rest of the world minus Europe. Europe competes against the United States in a similar but considerably ...

matches between the US and an international team, captained by

. Plattner is also an investor in San Jose Sports & Entertainment Enterprises, which owns the San Jose Sharks, and other related properties as well as managing the city owned SAP Center at San Jose. In 2013, he bought out two of the partners in SJS&E, and began serving as the Sharks' representative on the

National Hockey League The National Hockey League (NHL; french: Ligue nationale de hockey—LNH, ) is a professional ice hockey league in North America comprising 32 teams—25 in the United States and 7 in Canada. It is considered to be the top ranked professional ...

's board of governors.Sharks Sports & Entertainment Announces Changes to Ownership Group (January 2013)
SJSharks.com; accessed 19 May 2014. The absentee owner rarely has been seen in the San Jose area over the years, however, as general manager Mike Grier, and his staff run the hockey operations.

Philanthropy

Plattner signed

The Giving Pledge The Giving Pledge is a campaign to encourage extremely wealthy people to contribute a majority of their wealth to philanthropic causes. , the pledge has 236 signatories from 28 countries. Most of the signatories of the pledge are billionaires, a ...

in February 2013. In 2015, he set up the Hasso Plattner Foundation and the charity's activities span education, art and culture, and conservation. Since 2017, the foundation has been headquartered at Villa Wunderkind in Potsdam, the former home of German fashion designer Wolfgang Joop.

HIV/AIDS

Plattner has had strong connections with South Africa over the years and spends some of his time living there, while participating in charitable work. In the fight against AIDS, he supports the universities of

KwaZulu Natal KwaZulu-Natal (, also referred to as KZN and known as "the garden province") is a province of South Africa that was created in 1994 when the Zulu bantustan of KwaZulu ("Place of the Zulu" in Zulu) and Natal Province were merged. It is locate ...

and

Cape Town Cape Town ( af, Kaapstad; , xh, iKapa) is one of South Africa's three capital cities, serving as the seat of the Parliament of South Africa. It is the legislative capital of the country, the oldest city in the country, and the second largest ...

. Plattner's donation of €6 million for the ''Isombululo'' programme for the prevention and treatment of HIV/AIDS was announced at the

, one of the world's leading international golf tournaments in 2003 and it is suggested that this amount will have helped 360,000 people. In the spring of 2005, Plattner personally covered the costs of the 46664 benefit concert, which took place at his Gary Player-designed golf course, The Links of Fancourt in George which is near

and which was broadcast globally on television. Proceeds went towards the

Global Fund to Fight AIDS, Tuberculosis and Malaria The Global Fund to Fight AIDS, Tuberculosis and Malaria (or simply the Global Fund) is an international financing and partnership organization that aims to "attract, leverage and invest additional resources to end the epidemics of HIV/AIDS, t ...

, an organisation co-founded by former South African president Nelson Mandela.

Architecture and visual arts

Plattner contributed more than €20 million which enabled reconstruction of the historic exterior of the Stadtschloss in

Potsdam Potsdam () is the capital and, with around 183,000 inhabitants, largest city of the German state of Brandenburg. It is part of the Berlin/Brandenburg Metropolitan Region. Potsdam sits on the River Havel, a tributary of the Elbe, downstream o ...

, which had damaged during World War II and demolished in 1959. At the time, it was the largest donation ever gifted in Germany by a single individual. In 2016, Plattner joined forces with art dealer Guy Wildenstein to form the Wildenstein Plattner Institute, a foundation dedicated to advancing art historical scholarship by fostering the accessibility, cataloguing, and digitisation of primary sources. Plattner also helped in the establishment of the Museum Barberini, devoted to his holdings of modern and Impressionist art, as well as artists active in the former German Democratic Republic (GDR). In 2022, he opened Das Minsk, another private museum in Potsdam, which focuses on East German artists who were active after the fall of the Berlin wall.

Research

Since his retirement from SAP, Plattner has been particularly active as a benefactor in the field of technological research. Media reports have named him one of Germany's most important private sponsors of scientific research. In 1998, Plattner founded the Hasso Plattner Institute for software systems engineering based at the University of Potsdam, and in

Palo Alto, California Palo Alto (; Spanish for "tall stick") is a charter city in the northwestern corner of Santa Clara County, California, United States, in the San Francisco Bay Area, named after a coastal redwood tree known as El Palo Alto. The city was es ...

, its sole source of funding being the non-profit Hasso Plattner Foundation for Software Systems Engineering. Plattner has pledged €50 million of his personal fortune over a period of 20 years. Since its foundation, Plattner's commitment to the HPI has quadrupled to over €200 million. He not only fully finances the HPI, but is also actively involved as a director and lecturer in Enterprise Platforms and Integration Concepts. In October 2005, with a donation of US$35 million, Plattner founded the Hasso Plattner Institute of Design at Stanford University. Students of varying disciplines have been charged with the development of user-friendly innovations. Another of Plattner's pledges to promote science was of €10 million to redevelop the

library A library is a collection of materials, books or media that are accessible for use and not just for display purposes. A library provides physical (hard copies) or digital access (soft copies) materials, and may be a physical location or a vir ...

at the University of Mannheim, Germany, given in 2003.

Recognition

On 21 January 2004, at a ceremony at the Hasso Plattner Institute celebrating the 60th birthday of its founder, German Chancellor Gerhard Schröder made the following comments on Plattner's achievements: "We need more Hasso Plattners and more SAPs in order to get Germany moving again economically."Hasso Plattner Institute, Potsdam, Germany
accessed 7 May 2014. According to the Chancellor, Plattner created an international corporation proving "that German companies can be at the top of the technological hierarchy worldwide". In an interview in August 2004, the

Munich Munich ( ; german: München ; bar, Minga ) is the capital and most populous city of the German state of Bavaria. With a population of 1,558,395 inhabitants as of 31 July 2020, it is the third-largest city in Germany, after Berlin and Ha ...

-based management consultant Roland Berger named Hasso Plattner as one of the five Germans who have made the greatest impression on him. In the ''

Welt am Sonntag Welt, welts or variants may refer to: Media * ''Die Welt'' (''The World''), a German national newspaper ** '' Welt am Sonntag'' (''World on Sunday''), the Sunday edition of ''Die Welt'' * ''Die Welt'', former weekly newspaper in Vienna, Austria ...

'' article Berger pointed out how Plattner founded, built up and adapted SAP to a changing market was a "master achievement".

Honorary degrees

Plattner received his honorary doctorate in 2002 and his honorary professorship in 2004 from the

University of Potsdam The University of Potsdam is a public university in Potsdam, capital of the state of Brandenburg, Germany. It is mainly situated across three campuses in the city. Some faculty buildings are part of the New Palace of Sanssouci which is known ...

. He had also received an honorary doctorate (1990) and an honorary professorship in Information Systems (1994) from the Saarland University, Saarbrücken. The same university named him an honorary senator in 1998.

Awards

* 2014 – ''Leonardo European Corporate Learning Award'', "Thought Leadership" category * 2015 – GABA Lifetime Achievement Award, presented by the German American Business Association (GABA) * 2016 – Prize for Understanding and Tolerance, presented by the

Jewish Museum Berlin The Jewish Museum Berlin (''Jüdisches Museum Berlin'') was opened in 2001 and is the largest Jewish museum in Europe. On of floor space, the museum presents the history of Jews in Germany from the Middle Ages to the present day, with new focuses ...

Personal life

He is married, has two children, and lives in

, Germany.Hasso Plattner & Family
Retrieved 18 April 2022.

References

External links

Hasso Plattner Ventures, Potsdam, Germany
{{DEFAULTSORT:Plattner, Hasso 1944 births Living people IBM employees SAP SE people Businesspeople from Berlin Businesspeople in software German billionaires German chief executives German company founders 20th-century German businesspeople 21st-century German businesspeople German corporate directors German expatriates in South Africa German philanthropists Giving Pledgers 21st-century philanthropists San Jose Sharks owners Technology company founders 20th-century art collectors 21st-century art collectors German art collectors