And he arranged the appointment of a chief operating officer to make SAP's top-heavy organisation more efficient.
Back then, Mr Kagermann and SAP's founder-shareholders politely rejected the approach.
Forbes Associate Editor Victoria Barret chatted with SAP's new co-CEO, Bill McDermott, to get a sense of the company's plans.
Costanza Castelnuovo-Tedesco, SAP's vice president of global advertising and branding, says the company turned to mobile marketing as a way of reaching its target audience of C-level execs and "senior business decision makers, " who are early adopters of technology and are frequently on the road.
The Microsoft-SAP revelations are the latest twist in Oracle's year-old attempt to acquire Peoplesoft, now ranked as one of the most bitterly fought takeover battles of recent years.
SAP's TomorrowNow offers third-party support for businesses that use PeopleSoft software.
Gullotti has positioned NCS as the K-12 market's equivalent of German enterprise-software giant SAP.
SAP's reputation for according time-to-market a low priority.
Responding to charges filed by Oracle (nasdaq: ORCL - news - people ) in U.S. federal court in late March, SAP (nyse: SAP - news - people ) Chief Executive Henning Kagermann acknowledged Tuesday that TomorrowNow, a subsidiary of the business software specialist, had "inappropriately" downloaded software patches and support documents from rival Oracle--while expressing dismay that Ellison chose to take his beef to U.S. federal courts.
For one thing, investors will have to accept the fact that the Xbox is probably going to sap money from Microsoft's (nasdaq: MSFT - news - people ) bottom line.
In October 2007 he engineered the purchase of Business Objects, a Franco-American software firm whose products are supposed to drive SAP's future growth.
In its filing, Oracle contends that users logging in from Internet addresses associated with rival SAP's subsidiary TomorrowNow used account information from former or soon-to-be former Oracle customers to download software patches, technical information and other materials.
For SAP, Europe's largest software concern, such trends are a wake-up call.
Ms. Rees-Mogg, who has five full-time employees, says cost was a big factor in recently choosing SAP's offering.
These solutions included expansion of the company's managed mobility services for tablets, mobile access to cloud-based SAP applications and enhanced security management programs for health care providers.
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Dassault, the second-largest software company in Europe, behind SAP, is hardly known in the U.S. That's because most of its software is distributed and serviced worldwide by IBM.
At the same time it's suing SAP, Oracle has been trying to undercut the support business of open-source software company Red Hat (nasdaq: RHAT - news - people ).
Another company that could be dinged by a U.S. slump, paradoxically, is the German software vendor SAP (nyse: SAP - news - people ).
Oracle (nasdaq: ORCL - news - people ) filed a lawsuit in U.S. District Court in San Francisco Thursday, alleging that rival SAP (nyse: SAP - news - people ) is stealing software and confidential materials as part of an effort to offer "cut-rate" support services to Oracle's customers.
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