The recent management reshuffle at business software maker SAP led to the departure of the chief executive Leo Apotheker. His replacement as one of two co-CEOs, former head of product development, Jim Hagemann Snabe, gave his view of the post-crisis world in an interview with The Banker's editor Brian Caplen at Davos just before the announcement of his promotion.

The crisis has made large companies face up to their responsibilities as corporate citizens and put a huge effort into using their skills and technologies to bring about positive global change.

Under this topic there are many issues such as sustainability and risk management. The IT industry is taking much more responsibility on sustainability and how it can be an enabler. At SAP, we have taken serious steps ourselves. We have committed to a 50% reduction in carbon emission ourselves and we are enabling our solutions for our customers to have better transparency and opportunity to manage their sustainable agenda - that is a big theme.

The crisis made companies reconsider how much responsibility they have both locally in the areas where they are and globally because of the important role they play in the international economy. This is not a short-term fix in the sense of suddenly there is a crisis, we put something new on the agenda and a year later it is gone.

At Davos, both non-governmental organisation and private sector leaders have been taking significant responsibility in trying to solve world hunger problems - for example, a company such as TNT helping with the logistics and other companies contributing different kinds of expertise. This trend has been accelerated by the crisis and business leaders are taking much more responsibility in the world.

The new wave

Regardless of the crisis, there are also many ways in which the next wave of technology is going to contribute to the improvement of the world. For instance, I went to a health-care session looking at small devices that you can have on your body that tell you how much energy you are using and your food intake, and with that information you can prevent diseases rather than trying to fix them afterwards.

There is the whole mobile telephone revolution whereby you can use devices to make a local medical diagnosis. People can do it themselves because so many people now have mobile telephones - there are 4.5 billion mobiles out there now and with a simple interface you can recognise diseases locally and use global infrastructure to help cure them. This will be the next technology revolution and opportunity, largely driven by connectivity and mobility.

Then there is cloud computing which enables consumption of software and technology in a much simpler way than in the past.

The issues surrounding financial services are also largely IT related. It is about understating the real-time risk you have in a bank and for that you need very new infrastructure, whereas most banks have a patchwork of technologies.

We have seen, in our fourth-quarter results, an extreme growth in financial services - in the same year that we had the biggest crisis in financial services. Why is that? You would think it would be the opposite. Banks are taking steps to revitalise their infrastructure and get to a much simpler architecture and more standardised infrastructure that can, first of all, get scale, but also is in real time and is not a patchwork of pieces that are 20 years old.

Picking up pace

In the high-growth economies such as Brazil, India and China, there is an opportunity to jump a generation of legacy infrastructure, such as the mobile being the preferred communication infrastructure and not the landline. And with this you get completely different opportunities.

Bill Gates has categorised the world in terms of the mature economies where you cannot change anything, the evolving economies which can tolerate disruptions, and the poor economies where you need the basics such as food and medicine. In the mature countries you will see the slowest pace of evolution because there is so much legacy that you cannot change things. If you want to go for electric cars, there are too many cars with petrol engines already and too many vested interests, whereas if you start afresh you can make disruptive moves and there will be no one against it.

If you look at the infrastructural investment in countries such as Brazil, India and China, they are going to be very high over the years to come and that is where you will see breakthrough innovations happening because they do not have the legacy problems.

It is the same in banking. The countries evolving the slowest are the countries with the biggest legacy problem. It is not that they do not see the benefit of the software, it is just that the pain of getting there is so high. The first banks that took our software outside of Germany were banks in China and South Africa.

We talk to banks in some of these countries and say 'why don't we work together - a bank, a telco and SAP - to provide banking by mobile and reach 400 million people fast'. These ideas come from the emerging markets not the mature markets.

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