EUROPE'S HIGH-TECH HEAVY

IBM and Microsoft are candidates, of course. We think we will be there; Oracle believes that, too. After that the list gets thin.

SAP is a gigantic company. Why does it take a takeover offer from Bill Gates to put you in the spotlight?

Unlike Microsoft, we don't deal with consumers. You won't find SAP at home on your PC. But we have 20 million users at more than 20,000 companies that run their operations with our software. In almost all industries, at least six or seven of the 10 largest companies run on SAP. In the oil industry it's 10 out of 10; pharmaceuticals, nine out of 10; we're still missing Pfizer. Now that we are moving into smaller and midsize companies, we will become better known.

Where you will be competing with Microsoft, the first time a European company is going head to head with the U.S. giant.

When you're already present in almost every office, like Microsoft is with its Office programs, it's no great surprise that you'll want to expand into small-business applications as well. We have big-industry solutions that we are scaling down and standardizing for smaller companies. The market is huge and fragmented, served by thousands of little software suppliers. That leaves plenty of room for both of us not to step on each other's toes right away.

Still, you are challenging Microsoft and IBM in the so-called platform wars.