SAP: 'It's about business'

As Graf put it: “People would rather hear the bad news than be left estimating how bad it really is.”

Another indicator, perhaps one of the more sensitive, is the percentage of female executives at SAP. At 18.7 percent after increasing nearly 1 percentage point over the past year, these numbers reflect the always shocking and persistent industrywide male dominance in corporate leadership and management roles in the year 2012. SAP’s underwhelming yet reasonable goal is to get to 25 percent female management in the next five years. And while the company has made well-intentioned investments in female entrepreneurship in Ghana, for instance, such heart-warming narratives don’t quite make up for the gender gap in its own business units around the globe.

And then there is the company’s ambitiously sweeping statement that “SAP protects 900 million people” by doing the business it does. At the end of a few days in Orlando, one can see how such ideas are increasingly contagious as SAP, and crucial to a tech-hungry world chock full of challenges.