Shai Agassi doesn't remember the purpose of the first software program he coded, but he does remember sprinting to feed the punch card into the mainframe and watch it run. He was 7. "I wasn't allowed into the punch-card area next to the big mainframe," Agassi says, recalling a computer science program for kids he attended at Israel's Tel Aviv University. "We had to run a mile to submit the program and get the results." Today, Agassi leads technology development for Germany's SAP, the world's third-largest independent software supplier. At 35 he's the youngest of SAP's seven-member executive board and one of only two non-Germans. His rise has been rapid. Agassi joined SAP in 2001 when SAP paid $400 million for his corporate portal company TopTier Software ―one of four technology companies Agassi founded in the 1990s after graduating with honors from Technion, the Israel Institute of Technology, with a bachelor's degree in computer science. Agassi oversees development of SAP's integration and application platform and co-leads the company's applications strategy team. He says he never expected to end up at a company as large as SAP, but he finds it a good fit."The first year I was at SAP, I fell in love with the company" he says.
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