Join our community and be part of the conversation.
To subscribe, simply enter your email address on our website or click the subscribe button below. Don't worry, we respect your privacy and won't spam your inbox. Your information is safe with us.
Lars Dalgaard, Bob Calderoni, Graham Younger, Vishal Sikka and Shawn Price: What do all these gentlemen have in common? They are the top heads of SAP’s cloud business (Sikka was instrumental in launching HANA), who have all left the German software company, in the space of one year.
Despite its illustrious history of spearheading integrated business software into the mainstream, currently SAP seems to be grappling with converting their on-premise offerings to revenues from a viable next-gen cloud platform. Could SAP have missed the boat to crafting a coherent and comprehensive next-gen cloud applications foundation with Business ByDesign, SAP’s fully integrated and on-demand ERP suite. The market has also been reacting, by slowly phasing out SAP deployments, in favour of solutions with a clear future strategy in the cloud ie. Oracle, Microsoft. SAP’s cloud strategy on the other hand, is still in infancy, and cloudy at best. They seem to ne doing their hardest to be a cloud company. But stitching together cloud services from their acquisitions like Ariba and SuccessFactors, doth not maketh a cloud company. Ariba and SuccessFactors each have their own complex legacies to juggle as well. Especially in the area of HR, there is a lot of apprehension about SAP’s USD3 .4 billion acquisition of SuccessFactors, a leading human resources software. Already, one HR community forum on LinkedIn reads: CONFUSION – SAP now offers full ERP including HR on the cloud. What about SuccessFactors EC? http://linkd.in/1ltb8jt. Any company, especially one that provides tech and IT solutions, is bound to hit snags. Technology is a fast-paced industry where time to obsolescence is creeping up ever faster all the time, and strategy realignments is common practice. But, in SAP’s case, all of its top cloud heads leaving now, and its competitors coming at it from all sides, could see the German-based software maker be in enough trouble to lose its lead in the business software arena. IT BYTES BACK! says: SAP could lose more than just its cloud heads, but also its lead in the marketplace. Place your big winning bets on cloud computing now, if you haven’t yet.
