SAP reorganizes business units to align sales, product strategy
SAP announced several key organizational changes on Thursday that aim to unify the company's communication channels and product strategy and improve integration scenarios across its product portfolio.
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The enterprise software giant -- which is moving forward under the duel leadership of Jennifer Morgan and Christian Klein following the departure of CEO Bill McDermott in October -- is adopting a new organizational model that aligns functions across divisions.
Specifically, the company is establishing six primary product areas: SAP Customer Experience, S/4HANA, SuccessFactors, Intelligent Spend (which includes SAP Ariba, Fieldglass, and Concur), HANA and Analytics, and Qualtrics. The SAP Cloud Platform will serve as the underlying technology platform for all these areas, the company said.
Meanwhile, SAP's sales, service, and customer success organizations will be bundled under the Customer Success board area managed by Adaire Fox-Martin. Product management, development, and support will also come together under one board area led by Thomas Saueressig. SAP's overall platform and technology development will be managed by Juergen Mueller.
For SAP, the new organizational structure could help the company present its product portfolio to customers in a less confusing and disjointed way. The company has long had a reputation of being complex and expensive, with customers at times struggling to understand the link between price and value when it comes to SAP's bevy of products. SAP has also struggled to successfully orient acquired companies and technologies with its core product.
SAP has taken steps in the past to shed this perception, including a similar reorganization 2018, in which the company aggregated its multiple sales teams into a single Global Customer Organisation (GCO) to coordinate customer engagement.
"Our customers rightly expect our portfolio of services to be seamlessly integrated and for all solutions to work together smoothly. SAP's success is dependent on customers' trust in our competence and ability to solve their challenges of the future," said co-CEO Klein.
SAP also announced that board members Stefan Ries and Michael Kleinemeier are leaving the company.