SAP AG sent an email to employees, this week, announcing the hiring of John Wookey as executive vice president of “Large Enterprise On Demand.” Mr. Wookey reports to Jim Hagemann Snabe, head of SAP’s Business Solutions and Technology (BST). Mr. Snabe is responsible for all product development for large enterprises. This includes the SAP Business Suite and SAP NetWeaver.
While we seldom focus on new hires, Mr. Wookey is different because of his pedigree: Up until a year ago, he was Oracle’s senior vice president for all application development, a position he assumed in April 2000. He joined Oracle in April 1995 as vice president of development for financial applications.
Mr. Wookey was hired to align all of SAP’s various On Demand products into a coherent offering. The “pieces” include CRM, e-sourcing, and the business process optimization portions of human capital management (delivered via ADP’s outsourcing services). He will also be responsible for developing additional applications and services.
One core tenet of the new focus is “easier consumption.” SAP is looking to Mr. Wookey to simplify the configuration, use, and operation of the software-as-a-service (SaaS) products. Easier consumption also includes reducing the cost and time of third-party implementations often associated with SAP on premise projects. SAP would like to free up some of the spending on third-party services so that it can accelerate subsequent phases of various SaaS initiatives.
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