I'm not the biggest fan of Shai Agassi, President of SAP's Products and Technology Group. I therefore think his announced departure from SAP is a net positive for the company. Shai is the one who made the terribly gauche comments about open source. (He narrowly got out of delivering Peter Graf's OSBC keynote which increased the SAP-rubbish-quotient-on-open-source, as Stephe Walli pointed out.) He was the one who I’m not the biggest fan of Shai Agassi, President of SAP’s Products and Technology Group. I therefore think his announced departure from SAP is a net positive for the company. Shai is the one who made the terribly gauche comments about open source. (He narrowly got out of delivering Peter Graf’s OSBC keynote which increased the SAP-rubbish-quotient-on-open-source, as Stephe Walli pointed out.)He was the one who suggested that SAP’s budget would atone for its many failings in innovating with SaaS. At least he wasn’t the SAP automaton that said this about open source:It is an option for operating systems and databases but not at the business application level,” he said. “There are no open source ERP products that are any good for the high end, although it could be argued that they could be developed for the low end.It might be true that his ERP business is today safe from open source, but it is emphatically, demonstrably silly in the extreme that open source is not hitting the business application level. This is so clownishly wrong that it almost begs someone to take der Bollo and give him a healthy dose of reality. I work for and advise several open source application companies, and our customers are Global 2000 companies with enterprise-wide deployments of Alfresco, SugarCRM, JasperSoft, Pentaho, etc etc. Shai is apparently heading to the “alternative energy” sector. Good luck. I hope he learns a bit more about what it means to be disruptive, because SAP is stuck in a mental cloud that causes it to think that its proprietary business will last forever. It won’t. Just ask Unix. Open Source