My position
Dr. Karl Popp is director of mergers and acquisitions at SAP AG, one of the largest software companies in the world, responsible for holistic analysis of acquisition opportunities.
My expertise
Business Models in the software industry. From theory to successful execution. (10 years)
Partner relationships in the software industry. Planning, creation, successful execution of OEM and resell relationships. (10 years, 50 partnerships)
Mergers and Acquisitions in the software industry. Holistic analysis of acquisition opportunities and setting the framework for successful execution. (5 years)
My values
Do the best analysis, then find the best pragmatic solution
Transparency in everything i do.
Communication is key.
Empathy is key to create motivating solutions to problems.
My passion
Excellence in everything i do, from business to sports. I studied economics and finalized my Ph.D. about model driven architecture as planned. At the same time i was a successful competitive athlete in german Basketball. At SAP, i was running leading edge research and development activities, at the same time, i was running an academic research project.
My competitive differentiator
Leveraging my expert technical and business knowledge and outstanding analytical skills to find the best pragmatic solutions for business and technical challenges.
My history
Before working on M&A, Karl has managed all OEM and Resell partnerships for SAP NetWeaver, SAP´s technology platform. In this function he managed the evaluation of several dozen OEM and Resell suppliers, the contracts and the continuous improvements in processes for supplier management.
In addition, Karl continuously researches in the field of business process modeling and linking business process models to application systems for more than twenty years. Karl has published three books on this subject in german in 2009.
His current research interest is on structures of the software industry, esp. ecosystems of companies, management of ecosystems and business models for partnerships between software vendors. He also researches supply chains in the software in industry as chains of OEM relationships.
He is a long time member of Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) and IEEE and was appointed SAP Ventures fellow in 2007 and SAP Ventures MVP in 2008.
My web information