Prof. Dr. Alexander Zeier is Co-Founder & Chief Scientist at Nova Intelligence — the agentic AI platform for enterprise systems (SAP and beyond, for end-to-end business processes), with customer deployments demonstrating fivefold productivity gains. Backed by leading Silicon Valley investors Accel and Conviction as well as by SAP.iO, SAP’s investment arm, Nova covers the entire lifecycle — from ECC-to-S/4HANA transformation to the operation and evolution of existing S/4HANA systems. Customers include Festo, Fresenius, KION, ZEISS and Haas.

Before founding Nova, Prof. Zeier served as Deputy to SAP founder Prof. Hasso Plattner, initiating and leading the original Project “HANA” to invent the “New Architecture” that became the foundation of SAP S/4HANA. He headed the core team from April 2006 to the 2012 launch, co-invented eight patented innovations and is co-author with Prof. Plattner of In-Memory Data Management (Springer).

He spent over a decade at Accenture as Managing Director and Global CTO for SAP, directing hundreds of enterprise transformations to HANA and S/4HANA and leading the world’s largest SAP practice with 85 000 professionals. Earlier, he earned his PhD on SAP’s supply-chain solution (SAP APO) and joined SAP as Product Manager, helping lead the solution to global market leadership by 2005. He began working with SAP systems in 1992.

With over three decades shaping the SAP landscape — from inventing the HANA data platform to leading its largest practice as CTO — Prof. Zeier has brought his own knowledge as an architect into the Nova platform. For CIOs, he is a trusted sparring partner who knows the SAP market as few others do — and who shows how agentic AI makes S/4HANA modernization faster, frees capacity for change and reduces risk.

Prof. Zeier has been Honorary University Professor of Computer Science at the University of Magdeburg since 2013, is author of 150+ publications and 10 books, and served as Visiting Scholar at Stanford and Visiting Professor at MIT.

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