Meet the C-Suite Executive Team of SAP SE [2026]

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SAP SE remains one of the world’s most consequential enterprise software companies, and its leadership structure reflects the scale and complexity of that influence. At a time when the company is sharpening its focus on cloud transformation, business AI, platform innovation, and long-term customer value, the composition of SAP’s top executive team offers an important window into how strategic power is distributed across the organization. The company’s current leadership model combines formal governance at the Executive Board level with a broader operating architecture that gives senior leaders direct influence over finance, product engineering, operations, people strategy, technology, marketing, and customer success. Recent leadership changes have further reinforced SAP’s emphasis on tighter alignment between selling, delivery, and customer outcomes.

In this compilation, we feature SAP’s most influential C-suite and top leadership executives based on role authority, enterprise-wide scope, and strategic importance to the company’s future direction. The list is designed not simply to identify titles, but to show who holds meaningful decision-making power across SAP’s governance, growth agenda, product roadmap, and customer ecosystem. For senior readers, investors, and business leaders, this provides a clearer view of the executives shaping SAP’s next phase of evolution—and the individuals whose responsibilities carry the greatest weight inside one of the world’s most important software enterprises.

Meet the C-Suite Executive Team of SAP SE [2026]

Rank	Executive	Position at SAP SE	Key Functional Area or Focus
1	Christian Klein	Chief Executive Officer (CEO) and Chairman of the Executive Board	Corporate strategy, overall performance, executive decision authority
2	Dominik Asam	Chief Financial Officer (CFO), Executive Board	Finance & administration; enterprise financial governance
3	Thomas Saueressig	Executive Board (Customer Services & Delivery); expanded to Chief Customer Officer leading Customer Value Group from 1 April 2026	End-to-end customer journey, delivery, services, support; increased go-to-market alignment
4	Muhammad Alam	Executive Board (SAP Product & Engineering)	Global business applications portfolio strategy, development, and SaaS operations
5	Sebastian Steinhaeuser	Chief Operating Officer (COO), Executive Board (Strategy & Operations)	Strategy execution, operational simplification, business operations & processes
6	Gina VargiuBreuer	Chief People Officer & Labor Director, Executive Board	Global people agenda, labour relations, organisation and culture
7	Philipp Herzig	Chief Technology Officer (CTO), Extended Board	Technology strategy, innovation, research, corporate development; Business AI leadership roots
8	Ada Agrait	Chief Marketing Officer (CMO), Extended Board	Brand, demand, field & digital marketing, marketing operations
9	Jan Gilg	Global President Customer Success & Americas, Extended Board	Americas customer success and growth; co-lead Customer Success; Business Suite go-to-market oversight
10	Emmanuel “Manos” Raptopoulos	Global President Customer Success Europe, APAC, Middle East & Africa, Extended Board	Customer success and growth across EMEA/APAC/Middle East & Africa; strategic engagement
11	Manoj Swaminathan	General Manager & Chief Product Officer, Business Suite, Finance & Spend, Extended Board	S/4HANA Finance and CFO portfolio; Ariba, Fieldglass, Concur; suite alignment
12	Michael Ameling	President, SAP Business Technology Platform, Extended Board	Platform foundation (BTP), security/reliability, core platform products
13	Thomas Pfiester	Head of Customer Engagement & Adoption, Extended Board	Customer engagement model, adoption acceleration, services/support engagement
14	Sebastian Behrendt	Head of Global Finance, Extended Board	Core finance processes, controlling/finance transformation support
15	Monika Schaller	Chief Communications Officer, Extended Board	Corporate communications, reputation management, executive advisory

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Christian Klein — Chief Executive Officer

Christian Klein is SAP SE’s CEO and Chairman of the Executive Board, carrying overall responsibility for SAP’s strategic direction, management, and performance. He joined SAP in 1999, rising through finance and operational leadership before joining the Executive Board in 2018 to lead the Intelligent Enterprise Group, combining responsibility for core applications with a cross-board mandate for global operations. Klein’s operational credibility is rooted in his earlier tenure as SAP’s Chief Operating Officer (2016–2021). He became Co-CEO in October 2019 and was appointed sole CEO in April 2020—an inflection point that placed him at the centre of SAP’s transformation agenda. Klein holds a diploma in International Business Administration from the University of Cooperative Education in Mannheim and also serves on the Supervisory Board of adidas AG.

Dominik Asam — Chief Financial Officer

Dominik Asam is SAP SE’s CFO and an Executive Board member, responsible for finance and administration (including major governance areas such as investor relations, legal, procurement, and internal audit). He has served as SAP CFO since March 2023, bringing a distinctly industrial and capital-markets-tested profile to a software company navigating a cloud-and-AI investment cycle. Before SAP, Asam was CFO at Airbus SE (2019–2023) and previously held the CFO role at Infineon Technologies (from 2011), with earlier leadership across controlling, treasury, M&A, and strategy in roles spanning RWE, Siemens, and Infineon. He began his career in investment banking at Goldman Sachs. Asam studied Mechanical Engineering at TU Munich and École Centrale Paris and holds a Master’s in Business Administration from INSEAD.

Thomas Saueressig — Executive Board, Customer Services & Delivery

Thomas Saueressig is a member of SAP’s Executive Board and, until the end of March 2026, heads the Customer Services & Delivery Board area with global responsibility for long-term customer value in the cloud—spanning professional services, premium engagements, support, and SAP’s cloud infrastructure and operations. SAP has announced that, effective 1 April 2026, Saueressig’s mandate expands: he will lead a newly created Customer Value Group as Chief Customer Officer, aligning selling, delivery, services, and support across the customer journey to drive adoption, renewal, and expansion. His credibility comes from having run high-impact internal transformations: earlier Executive Board responsibilities included SAP Product Engineering and a prior tenure as SAP’s CIO operating on a cloud-first approach. Saueressig joined SAP in 2004, holds a Business Information Technology degree (University of Cooperative Education Mannheim) and an Executive MBA (ESSEC/Mannheim Business School), and sits on Nokia’s Board of Directors.

Muhammad Alam — Executive Board, SAP Product & Engineering

Muhammad Alam leads SAP Product & Engineering as a member of the Executive Board, with global responsibility across SAP’s business software applications—from product strategy and design through development, transformation, marketing, and SaaS cloud operations. His remit spans the application estate that defines SAP’s market power, including ERP (public and private cloud) and major portfolios such as supply chain, spend management, business network, human capital management, customer experience, analytics/data, and related industry solutions. Alam joined SAP in 2022 as President and Chief Product Officer for Intelligent Spend Management and was appointed to the Executive Board in 2024. Before SAP, he spent 17 years at Microsoft, most recently as Corporate Vice President of Dynamics 365, leading product strategy, engineering, and operations for the portfolio. He began at Ernst & Young delivering ERP implementations, is a US Certified Public Accountant, and holds a bachelor’s degree from Morehouse College.

Sebastian Steinhaeuser — Chief Operating Officer

Sebastian Steinhaeuser is SAP’s COO and an Executive Board member, leading the Strategy & Operations board area with responsibility for accelerating strategy execution and simplifying operations—an influence centre that shapes how SAP actually delivers on its priorities. SAP’s governance announcements emphasise this role as a structural lever: the board area was created to drive SAP’s transformation journey by uniting strategy execution with operational simplification. Since joining SAP in 2020, Steinhaeuser has progressed from Chief Strategy Officer—where he also ran growth areas including Business Transformation Management, Business Network, and Sustainability—to an expanded Chief Strategy & Operating Officer mandate in 2024 that included oversight of business operations, processes, IT, and ecosystem/commercial functions. Before SAP, he worked at Boston Consulting Group, supporting corporate and digital transformations. He studied Business Administration at the European Business School and earned an MBA from Stanford.

Gina Vargiu-Breuer — Chief People Officer and Labor Director

Gina Vargiu-Breuer serves as SAP’s Chief People Officer and Labor Director and is a member of the Executive Board, leading the People & Culture organisation and owning SAP’s global people agenda. Her profile is built for large-scale organisational change: before joining SAP, she was SVP of Human Resources at Siemens Energy for more than four years, where she helped steer the company’s spin-off from Siemens AG and drove transformation across a workforce of 94,000 employees. Her work included building the HR value chain and implementing an operating model that integrated business processes with HR capabilities directly relevant to SAP’s ongoing shift in skills, operating cadence, and talent models. Earlier, she held senior HR roles at Siemens AG, including global HR leadership within Gas & Power. Vargiu-Breuer holds a master’s degree in Economic Psychology from the Catholic University of Eichstätt-Ingolstadt.

Philipp Herzig — Chief Technology Officer

Philipp Herzig is SAP’s Chief Technology Officer and a member of the SAP Extended Board—positioned at the crossroads of technology strategy and SAP’s enterprise AI agenda. SAP formally strengthened its remit in two steps: first, by creating a dedicated end-to-end “growth area” for AI under Herzig as Chief Artificial Intelligence Officer (effective January 2024, reporting directly to CEO Christian Klein) to cover the full value chain of SAP Business AI from research and product development through customer implementation. Then, SAP announced he would additionally take on the global CTO role (effective February 2025), overseeing technology strategy, innovation, research, and corporate development while driving Business AI and Sustainability success. Herzig’s technical credibility includes a PhD in Computer Science from TU Dresden, and his career has featured engineering leadership within SAP’s developer ecosystem.

Ada Agrait — Chief Marketing Officer

Ada Agrait is SAP’s Global Chief Marketing Officer and a member of the SAP Extended Board, leading marketing functions from brand and awareness through demand generation, adoption, field marketing, events, partner marketing, and digital experiences. Her mandate is explicitly commercial: SAP describes her organisation as driving strategies and global execution that support business objectives and contribute to sales growth and market leadership. Agrait joined SAP in 2022 with a transformation agenda for marketing operations and go-to-market effectiveness. Before SAP, she held senior marketing leadership roles at Microsoft, including Vice President of Commercial Marketing, and worked across product areas such as Bing, Microsoft 365, Power Platform, and Azure—experience aligned to SAP’s need to market a broad, integrated portfolio. Earlier, she worked at Ernst & Young and in agency leadership roles in New York City. She holds a bachelor’s degree from Syracuse University and an MBA in marketing and finance from Fordham Graduate School of Business.

Jan Gilg — Global President Customer Success & Americas

Jan Gilg is the Global President of Customer Success & Americas and a member of SAP’s Extended Board, responsible for strategy, day-to-day operations, and overall customer success across North and South America. SAP also positions him as a co-leader of the global Customer Success board area—an especially influential remit because SAP links it directly to cloud revenue and customer growth. In the company’s 2025 governance updates, SAP highlighted Gilg’s “strong product background,” noting that he previously served as President and Chief Product Officer for Cloud ERP. In March 2026, SAP announced that Gilg (and Manos Raptopoulos) will report directly to Thomas Saueressig as SAP brings selling and delivery closer together under the new Customer Value Group model (effective 1 April 2026). Gilg holds a master’s degree in Business Information Systems from the University of Liechtenstein and is a director at Taulia.

Emmanuel “Manos” Raptopoulos — Global President Customer Success Europe, APAC, Middle East & Africa

Emmanuel (“Manos”) Raptopoulos is the Global President of Customer Success for Europe, APAC, the Middle East, and Africa and serves on SAP’s Extended Board, combining regional leadership scale with a global customer outcomes mandate. SAP’s own regional leadership announcements underline the operational complexity of his territory: when SAP created a newly defined EMEA region, it appointed Raptopoulos as President with responsibility for 14,000 employees across 53 offices serving customers in 90 countries, building on earlier responsibilities in EMEA South. He joined SAP in 1998 and has held senior roles across general management, sales, operations, consulting, presales, and regional leadership—experience that maps cleanly to SAP’s customer lifecycle focus. With SAP’s March 2026 customer operating-model change, Raptopoulos is named as one of the Extended Board leaders reporting to Saueressig while continuing to co-lead Customer Success. He holds a Master’s in Mechanical Engineering from the National Technical University of Athens.

Manoj Swaminathan — Chief Product Officer, Business Suite, Finance & Spend

Manoj Swaminathan is a member of SAP’s Extended Board and serves as General Manager and Chief Product Officer for SAP’s Business Suite, Finance & Spend organisation, with oversight of the delivery, strategy, and alignment of the SAP Business Suite across pivotal portfolios. SAP’s description of its remit explicitly includes product engineering and marketing for SAP S/4HANA Finance, the Office of the CFO portfolio, SAP Ariba, SAP Fieldglass, and SAP Concur—assets that sit at the centre of the modern CFO technology stack. Before this suite-wide role, he was Chief Product Officer for Intelligent Spend and Business Network, and also led Application Foundation Services, focusing on shared platform components leveraged across SAP products. Swaminathan joined SAP in 2023 from Amazon (Director, Financials Foundation Service for eCommerce services) and previously held senior product and engineering roles at Microsoft, including leadership within Dynamics 365 supply chain and finance/operations architecture. He holds engineering and business/data credentials from Thiagarajar College of Engineering, Western Governors University (MBA), and the University of Texas at Austin (master’s in data science).

Michael Ameling — President, SAP Business Technology Platform

Michael Ameling is President (and Chief Product Officer, per SAP’s published biography) for SAP Business Technology Platform (SAP BTP) and a member of the SAP Extended Board, placing him at the backbone layer of SAP’s platform strategy. His organisation prioritises security, reliability, and next-generation user experience for SAP BTP—the foundation SAP describes as essential for customer success and for enabling generative-AI-powered applications. His portfolio responsibility includes core platform products such as SAP Build, SAP Integration Suite, SAP HANA Cloud, and the SAP BTP ABAP environment. Ameling joined SAP in 2006 as a Research Associate and advanced through technical leadership roles, including Development Manager and Managing Director of SAP Labs Dresden. He holds a PhD in computer science and a diploma in media computer science from Technische Universität Dresden—credentials consistent with a role that must balance developer experience, architecture, and enterprise-grade trust.

Thomas Pfiester — Head of Customer Engagement & Adoption

Thomas Pfiester is Head of Customer Engagement & Adoption and a member of SAP’s Extended Board, operating at the sharp edge of whether large enterprises realise value from SAP’s cloud and AI roadmap. SAP’s own governance communications cast his remit as “Global Customer Engagement,” and he is frequently referenced in SAP channels as a senior leader shaping services, support, and customer engagement models. In the March 2026 operating-model shift, his organisation sits in the broader customer lifecycle context, SAP is consolidating under a customer-centric approach. A SAP-supplied executive biography distributed via Equilar describes Pfiester as leading a global organisation of roughly 7,500 people focused on accelerating the adoption of SAP’s portfolio and helping customers modernise ERP with RISE with SAP. The same biography notes he has been with SAP since 2006 and holds academic credentials from Middlesex University and Ludwigshafen University of Business and Society, with additional executive education at Harvard Business School.

Sebastian Behrendt — Head of Global Finance

Sebastian Behrendt is Head of Global Finance (and SAP’s Chief Controlling Officer, in widely cited executive directories) and serves on the SAP Extended Board, anchoring the financial operating rhythm beneath the CFO’s enterprise governance scope. SAP’s own Extended Board and press materials position Global Finance leadership as central to sustainable growth and to SAP’s finance transformation agenda—particularly important in a cloud business where performance management depends on disciplined forecasting, renewals economics, and investment prioritisation. Without relying on inaccessible SAP biography PDFs, reputable executive summaries consistently describe Behrendt as leading core financial processes while accelerating a finance transformation programme. Those summaries also describe earlier SAP finance leadership roles, including regional CFO responsibilities and his appointment as Chief Controlling Officer in 2018—experience that aligns with enterprise planning depth rather than a purely reporting-oriented finance profile.

Monika Schaller — Chief Communications Officer

Monika Schaller is SAP’s Chief Communications Officer and a member of the Extended Board, responsible for developing and executing communications strategies designed to enhance and protect SAP’s reputation—and serving as a strategic advisor to the Executive Board. Her remit spans corporate narrative, stakeholder trust, and crisis resilience—areas of heightened importance for a global software provider operating in regulated, mission-critical enterprise environments. Schaller joined SAP in 2023. Before SAP, she served as Executive Vice President at Deutsche Post DHL Group, overseeing Corporate Communications, Sustainability, and Brand, and previously advised the Executive Board at Deutsche Bank as Deputy Head of Communications and Social Responsibility. She also spent nine years leading corporate communications for Goldman Sachs across multiple European regions, including through the 2008 financial crisis—experience directly relevant to managing complex, high-stakes narratives. Schaller began her career as a Bloomberg TV reporter focused on capital markets and central banks and holds a business administration degree from Wirtschaftsuniversität Wien.

Conclusion

SAP’s current leadership structure shows how enterprise influence is now distributed across far more than the traditional CEO-CFO axis. At SAP, strategic authority sits with a leadership group that combines formal board governance with operating leaders responsible for product engineering, finance, people, technology, marketing, platform innovation, and customer value creation. That structure has become even more consequential as the company deepens its focus on cloud execution, AI-led transformation, and end-to-end customer outcomes.

For business readers, investors, and leadership professionals, the real takeaway is not only who holds the top titles at SAP, but which executives are shaping the company’s next phase of growth, execution, and market relevance. As the role of senior leadership continues to evolve across global enterprises, understanding these profiles offers a clearer view of how modern corporate power is organized. To explore how today’s top executives build the skills required for such roles, check out our curated list of C-suite executive programs.