Henning Kagermann wants you to know that he is more than just a software geek.
Kagermann, the longtime chief executive of SAP, the giant maker of complex computer applications for business, is in the middle of a slow transition in which he will yield the top job entirely to Leo Apotheker, now the co-chief executive, when he retires in March.
Apotheker rose through the ranks of the SAP sales force, taking a notably different career path than Kagermann, a former physics professor who made his name as a developer.
The transition from Kagermann to Apotheker has fed an irresistible narrative in financial markets: The software egghead who shoveled cash into new projects is yielding to the uncompromising moneymaker. It is also a story that Kagermann dismisses with an unprintable barnyard epithet, and a terse reminder that he can do more than write code.
“People forget that I was head of sales for a few years,” Kagermann said during an interview. “I was not always the tech guy.”
There is some truth to the tale being told in the markets, but the reasons run deeper than a mere change of chief executives. The company is indeed shifting its focus more toward the bottom line, and less on the multibillion-dollar investments in technology that helped make it the market leader in the lucrative field of business software.
The goal, it seems clear, is for SAP to show that it can not only produce sophisticated software that companies depend on to run their businesses, but that it can do as well as its American archrival, Oracle, in satisfying the demands of investors.
Oracle achieved a pretax profit margin of about 35 percent last year, well ahead of the 26.7 percent operating margin that the German company managed in 2007.
And despite its edge in market share, SAP has lagged behind…