SAP's Leaders Pledge Speedier Product Innovation
SAP Co-Chief Executives Bill McDermott and Jim Hagemann Snabe have pledged to quicken the pace of product introductions and dealmaking at the German software company as they try to reverse the sales decline that led to the ouster of their predecessor, Leo Apotheker.
SAP (SAP), the world's largest maker of business applications software, is pushing a new engineering approach that is designed to get new products out the door faster, McDermott and Snabe told reporters and analysts on Mar. 15 at the company's campus in Palo Alto, Calif.
The first fruit of that approach will be a new version of the company's Business By Design Web software, a Web-delivered package of applications for small and midsized companies that McDermott said will arrive in July. The executives will also be "bolder" than their predecessors were in making acquisitions, he said.
"We're off to a very fast start," said McDermott, previously the company's head of North American sales. McDermott promised to "radically speed up" the pace of innovation at SAP. "We haven't stopped," McDermott says. "As you can see, we haven't slept either."
McDermott and Snabe replaced Apotheker on Feb. 7. Under Apotheker -- who served less than nine months in the top job -- and previous CEO Henning Kagermann, SAP had been criticized for moving too slowly to deliver new products, as well as for a lack of clarity about technology that would make SAP software more accessible via the Web and mobile devices.
SAP revenue fell 13%, to $14.88 billion, last year. Sales are expected to rise 1% in 2010, to $15 billion, according to analysts surveyed by Bloomberg. And while SAP stock gained 37% during the bull market of 2009, the shares lagged a 52% surge in the Standard & Poor's 500-stock index. SAP shares...
Posted: 2010-03-17 08:05:08
| < Prev | Next > |
|---|
