Prof. Dr. Alexander Zeier is Co-Founder & Chief Scientist at Nova Intelligence – the agentic AI platform for SAP custom code.
Based in Silicon Valley, Nova pioneers an agent-based system for SAP S/4HANA modernization, introducing a new way for enterprises to move from SAP ECC to S/4HANA and keep systems clean-core and future-ready. Nova’s AI agents analyze and document legacy code, identify fit-to-standard opportunities, and recompose extensions – enabling clean-core transformation and smoother upgrades with a 75 % productivity boost while reducing time, cost and technical debt.
Prior to founding Nova Intelligence, Prof. Zeier served as Deputy to SAP founder Prof. Hasso Plattner, initiating and leading the original Project “HANA” to invent the “New Architecture” for the next generation of SAP systems. He headed the core team from April 2006 to the 2012 launch and co-invented eight patented innovations. He is co-author with Prof. Plattner of In-Memory Data Management (Springer), which first explained the key inventions and business value of the new SAP HANA platform – the “New Architecture” that became the foundation of SAP S/4HANA.
He then spent over a decade at Accenture as Managing Director and Global CTO of the SAP Business Group, directing hundreds of enterprise transformations to HANA and S/4HANA and leading the world’s largest SAP practice with 85 000 professionals. He also served as Accenture’s first Cloud Fellow and as a Master Technical Architect (MTA) – the firm’s highest technical distinction – and sat on the Global MTA Board, which defined Accenture’s reference architectures adopted across 780 000 consultants worldwide. He founded the Accenture Innovation Center for SAP HANA, building a fast-growing business that generated billions in annual revenue with double-digit growth.
Earlier (1998 – 2006), he earned his PhD on SAP’s supply-chain solution (SAP APO) under Prof. Dr. Dr. h.c. mult. Peter Mertens at the University of Erlangen-Nürnberg – completed in three years – and then joined SAP, where he served as Product Manager, helping lead the solution to global market leadership by 2005 before starting Project “HANA” with Prof. Plattner in April 2006. During his MBA (Diplom-Kaufmann) studies, he began working with SAP systems in 1992 on SAP R/3 1.2.
With more than three decades shaping the SAP landscape – from inventing the HANA data platform to leading its largest transformation practice – Prof. Zeier now drives the next evolution: agentic AI for enterprise modernization.
At Nova Intelligence, he channels strategic, architectural, and technical expertise from hundreds of large-scale programs into an agentic AI platform that accelerates SAP modernization – from ECC to S/4HANA – while ensuring sustainable Clean Core compliance. A dedicated Nova AI Knowledge Core is created and maintained for each customer, preserving key business logic from their legacy SAP systems and turning it into a foundation for AI-driven innovation.
Prof. Zeier is Honorary University Professor of Computer Science at the University of Magdeburg, where he was appointed the first honorary professor in the Faculty of Computer Science in 2013. He is the author of 150 + publications and 10 books and has served as Visiting Scholar at Stanford (Artificial Intelligence) and Visiting Professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT).