SAP's Top Cloud Guy Has Left Causing SAP To Reshuffle Some Software Units
Both came on board as part of SAP's $4.3 billion acquisition of Ariba that closed in October, 2012.
Bob Calderoni is one of the execs leaving, a SAP spokesperson confirmed. (The news was first broken by the Spend Matters blog.) He was president of SAP Cloud and formerly the CEO of Ariba. A SAP spokesperson says he's leaving on good terms and will stick around as an advisor to SAP.
At the same time, Kevin Costello, who was running the Ariba business under SAP as president is also going, a spokesperson confirmed.
Calderoni became part of SAP's cloud leadership team in November, 2012 and the unchallenged top cloud guy after SuccessFactor's founder Lars Dalgaard left SAP last spring. SAP bought SuccessFactors for $3.5 billion in 2012 and Dalgaard lasted about a year at SAP, too.
With Calderoni gone, SAP is trying a new tactic. It is promoting Shawn Price to the top cloud spot and also reorganizing some of its non-cloud software businesses under Price. Price has been at SAP for a little over a year, running SuccessFactors.
And SAP says, more shuffling will be announced soon.
In addition to the cloud (which includes SuccessFactors and Ariba), Price will be responsible for certain "on premises" software units, meaning software that companies buy and install in their own data centers. He'll have the CRM software (customer relationship management), which competes with Salesforce.com and Oracle. He will also be responsible for other human resources software, competing with WorkDay and Oracle.
One interesting thing about Price is that before joining SAP, he spent almost three years as president of hot cloud startup Zuora.
Zuora is a cloud service for invoices that competes with financial software from SAP and Oracle. Its co-founder, Tien Tzuo, is who's who in the Valley's startup world. He was an early employee of Salesforce.com and Salesforce's CEO Marc Benioff is an investor in Zuora.
Tzuo famously told us that "Oracle and SAP are dead. They just don't know it yet."
So by choosing Price to lead SAP's cloud efforts, SAP is looking for ways to combat the cloud startups that are challenging it.
Here's the full statement SAP sent us:
After successfully leading the transition of Ariba into SAP, Bob Calderoni has taken the decision to leave SAP. We have benefitted greatly from Bob's vision in building SAP's leadership in the cloud, and we are grateful that Bob will remain as a strategic advisor to the Managing Board. We thank him for his efforts and wish him well in his endeavors.
We continue to simplify our organization as the cloud becomes an integral part of SAP's business. As part of this effort, Shawn Price will become president, Global Cloud & Line of Business. In this new role, Shawn expands on his previous position of president of SuccessFactors, to drive SAP's strategy and revenue generation across the lines of business, including HR, Sales, Service, Procurement, and Business Network, for both cloud and on-premise offerings. We expect to make additional organizational announcements in the coming weeks to provide our customers with a seamless experience and deliver on the promise of the SAP Cloud powered by SAP HANA.