SAP gets serious about the cloud - organizationally

Well, we will never really know till some time down the road - but there are many speculative options... here are the most likely ones from what I see today

SAP is giving the reins of development over to Sikka, who never formally was in charge of development (see here - per website today - and screenshot taken today) - but was running the technology foundation since the departure of former Business Objects technical leader Herve Couturier. 

In it's typical Ying vs Yang SAP also appointed Bernd Leukert to the Global Managing Board - the operative body under the executive board. Leukert has been in charge of all on premise, vertical products and BusinessOne and will be the 2nd highest product development executive going forward. This will reduce also the concerns of the still massive Walldorf based developer community to be run from abroad, which is one of the key fears in Walldorf, as manifested in the Agassi era. As well as SAP's large on premise customer base. 

The sales responsibility will go to the ex Ariba CEO, Bob Calderoni, who is hopefully a better sales professional than keynote presenter - granted it was tough to follow the sports show of Bill McDermott at Sapphire. But it also shows that at the point of time of Sapphire the re-org wasn't known or planned - as SAP would have given their new cloud sales leader a better and more prominent stage.

The cloud operations part goes to the longest tenured board member, Gert Oswald - how ends up always to get some pieces when major re-orgs happen at SAP. The former SuccessFactors team can start re-hearsing for Gert's famous 5 minute meetings. And the consulting side joins consulting with Rob Ensslin - a logical functional consolidation.

The potential looser is Hagemann-Snabe - who formally is responsible of product development - e.g. Leukert reported to him - and he is now more removed from day to day operations - which are clearly with Sikka now. This may start some speculation of the co-CEO structure going forward. 

On a side note - the just hired head of HR - Luisa Delgado - is leaving end of the quarter, after Angelica Dammann the 2nd women board member to stay shorter than anyone would hope. As usual Werner Brand takes over the HR and Work Director functions. Nicely buried in all the other changes - SAP will need to get it's diversity story right at executive level soon. 

The experiment of concentrating all cloud DNA has failed. Both on a general company level, and previously on a development level (remember John Wookey, and Peter Lorenz). Now it looks like cloud is a too big topic for a single individual at SAP - and the cloud related organizational functions are now separated across broader functional lines. And while it's a sign that SAP puts a team focus on the cloud efforts now - it will also mean significant ripples in the functional teams - between the new cloud teams joining the old functional teams. Close attention will have to be paid internally and externally on how much cloud talent will stay and keep getting SAP paychecks. 

Last week I speculated who would lead SAP to the 21st century, next generation applications. Now we know the responsibility falls on Sikka, and to some extent, for the business application legacy on Leukert.

Either the lack of the right executive or the realization, that cloud can only become part of the SAP DNA if it permeates across all functions, have lead to a functional organization of the cloud responsibilities across the SAP management. This is a good move allowing Sikka to be fully in charge of the product future of SAP. It increases the risk for SAP though, as the system of checks and balances put in place with Sikka's hire as CTO in Palo Alto, is now history.

Let's hope that enough cloud DNA will stay and develop in sales, consulting and operations for the rest of the company to make the turn to a cloud business. And as previously observed - HANA scales and SAP manages to invent the game changing 21st century business applications on the HANA platform.

And other good takes on this from

• @dahowlett - All change at SAP - here
• @ckanarauskas - SAP shakes up development organization - here
• @twailgum - SAP announces sweeping organizational changes - here