Christian Klein

Christian Klein is the CEO of SAP SE, Europe's most valuable technology company and the world's leading enterprise application software provider, with over 400,000 customers in 180+ countries. Born in 1980 in Germany, Klein joined SAP as a student intern in 1999 and never left — one of the most remarkable career trajectories in enterprise software. He was appointed CEO in April 2020 at age 39, making him the youngest CEO in SAP's history. Klein's central mission is completing SAP's transformation from an on-premise software company to a cloud-native platform. SAP's ERP systems run the core business processes — finance, supply chain, human resources, procurement — of the majority of the world's largest companies. The transition of this massive installed base from on-premise licenses to cloud subscriptions is both SAP's greatest opportunity and its most complex execution challenge. The RISE with SAP program, launched under Klein, is the vehicle for this migration — offering customers a bundled path to move their ERP systems to SAP's cloud (or hyperscaler clouds via partnerships with AWS, Azure, and Google Cloud). He has complemented this with the Business Technology Platform (BTP), an integration and extension layer that allows customers to build on top of SAP's cloud ERP. The company's cloud revenue has grown from under 30% to over 45% of total revenue during his tenure. Klein has also positioned SAP at the forefront of enterprise AI with Joule, SAP's AI copilot integrated across its application suite. His strategy leverages SAP's unique advantage: the company sits on the world's largest repository of enterprise transaction data, which gives SAP a differentiated position in training and deploying industry-specific AI models. Under Klein, SAP's market capitalization has more than doubled, surpassing $250 billion and making it the most valuable company in Germany.