Five Months After Appointing Shawn Price As Top Cloud Guy, SAP Has Let Him Go

Sources told Recode's Arik Hesseldahl that Price was fired and that his departure was announced internally on April 30.

James Dever, an SAP spokesman, confirmed to us that Price is gone, although he said that Price resigned and was not fired. No one is being promoted to take over his job:

"His role was a transformational role, and we're at a point where we're a leading cloud player. There will no longer be a single individual to be a cloud executives. His responsibilities will be divided among other executives."

The news comes two days after SAP announced that its top engineer, Vishal Sikka, has left and that SAP was promoting several executives to its top management boards to run the cloud business.

One of them was Rob Enslin, who leads global sales. Price's departure is due to Enslin, who is hand-picking his own team, sources told us.

Price was appointed just five months ago in January, when the company reshuffled its cloud computing leadership. At that time two of SAP's top cloud executives resigned: Bob Calderoni and Kevin Costello. Both of them left a little more than a year after they joined the company. They came on board as part of SAP's $4.3 billion acquisition of Ariba. SuccessFactor's founder Lars Dalgaard left SAP about a year after his company was acquired, too.

Before joining SAP, Price was president of Zuora, a hot cloud startup that competes with SAP in its bread-and-butter financial apps market.

This reshuffling is part of a bigger transition at SAP. On May 21, SAP will get rid of its dual CEO structure and make American Bill McDermott sole CEO. Co-CEO Jim Hagemann Snabe will stay at the company as a member of the supervisory board.

McDermott is putting his team in place.

With that, there's an internal power grab going on in the company, from what sources have told us. There is concern among the German contingent that too much power was in the hands of SAP's American contingent, who have been pressuring the board to move faster in the cloud computing market.

McDermott, an American, is clearly trying to build bridges with the Germans.

A source close to Price tells, "It just shows how hard a journey this is for SAP [cloud computing]. ... This affects who they can hire and keep, which becomes a vicious cycle."