Bob Evans’ Post

Transcript

Hello my friends, welcome back to Acceleration Economy's Cloud Wars Minute where here in the greatest growth market the world has ever known. I got a question for you. Are you creating your own future or are you going to be willing to live in a world where somebody else sets the rules for you? Now, SAP has been on a roll lately. It has been remarkable to see and I was really surprised a couple of weeks ago when the company announced that its chief revenue officer and its chief marketing and solutions. Officer would be leaving the company at the end of August. Now this was stated in a very sanitized press release, but pretty much the point was it was SAP's idea, not those of CRO, Scott Russell and Chief Marketing and Solutions Officer Julia White. So I wanted to speculate a little, why is this happening? What does it mean for SAP and why does this matter? Scott Russell had been an SAP for some time, had a great career in sales, had led their Asia Pacific region, was brought to the US to head the entire global organization about 3 1/2 years ago. And I think SAP at the time made a really smart move. They said it isn't just sales, but its sales service support, all those other customer facing teams. And the role that Russell had was global head of customer success and he was part of the executive board team there. Over the past couple of years, you know, SAP's revenue has been on a roll the most recent quarter, with their overall cloud revenue up 25% and their cloud ERP suite up 33%. Their business is growing two or three times faster than Salesforce and Oracle and much, much faster than either Workday or Microsoft. So it's way ahead of its field by any revenue measure. I think Russell was doing great, but 3 1/2 years ago, he was in charge of customer success. And late last year, SAP said there was going to form a new board position taking Thomas Saueressig, who had been in charge of product development, product engineering and he was going to be in charge of this new area called customer delivery. So that sort of took the handoff from where sales ended and then the actual implementation that was going to be now under Saueressig. So that did change Russell's role from customer success and sort of. Narrowed it to where he's chief revenue officer. The other roles - service, support - now went over to Saueressig. Now Scott Russell might have been thrilled by that. I I'm not sure. I don't think so. I can't think of any other reason though why. Somebody of his accomplishments would be deciding to leave the company. Very gracious post by Scott Russell on LinkedIn describing that and I go into a lot more detail on this in an article will have later today on accelerationeconomy.com. A similarly curious but different type of case with Chief Marketing and Solutions Officer Julia White; about four years ago when she was brought in to SAP to be the Chief Marketing and Solutions. After she'd had a terrific career, high flyer at Microsoft, it was interesting because they had an open position for the chief marketing officer, but White came in as chief marketing and solutions officer and part of what she said and others that SAP, we can't just be marketing things that are created completely independently. One of the things that company was doing was going in a lot of different directions. Before that. They wanted to unify these two roles. Marketing and solutions and bring that together, that was a big reason why White wanted to come to SAP and I think it's been a big reason for their success over the past four years, right? They're better known, better positioned, more articulate and how they describe what the business value is that they can drive. And yet this announcement that now that Russell and White are going to be leaving said that the position of Chief marketing solutions area on the executive board is going to be dissolved. Now and they said that product marketing will be joined up with the product teams. So I don't want to get too much into palace intrigue here and what does this all mean? But I just think it's sort of baffling that the Chief Revenue Officer and the Chief marketing and solutions officer who have been such an integral part of the companies surge over the last few years to become by far the fastest growing enterprise applications coming in the world that they'd be leaving on the flip side, I think. Christian Klein, the CEO, for the past 4 1/2 years that he's been in that role, has operated flawlessly. All the big decisions he's made have turned out well. And I think he's earned the right for us to be able to sit back a little, give him some time to show and demonstrate why these changes are ultimately going to be beneficial to the company and its customers. But for now, I'm still scratching my head a little bit. But Christian Klein, as I said, deserves the right to let this play out. And we'll see how. What eventually works out here? Thanks for being with us here at Cloud Wars Minute. I hope you have a fantastic day.