SAP taps new head of NetWeaver partner program

Business applications provider SAP on Tuesday named Zia Yusuf as executive vice president of platform ecosystem, replacing George Paolini.

Yusuf, an SAP veteran who worked in the company's strategy division, will report to Shai Agassi, the president of SAP's product technology group. Paolini, who previously worked in Java development at Sun Microsystems and Borland Software, joined SAP in March of last year to help encourage the creation of third-party add-on products for SAP's NetWeaver software. NetWeaver is SAP's back-end middleware, which is designed for connecting SAP data to other applications. In a statement, Agassi said SAP now has 1,000 software companies building add-ons for NetWeaver.