The future's bright, the future's Cloudy! That was the one of the messages from SAP's new co-CEOs as they set out their stall with a charm offensive designed to allay jittery nerves among customers and on Wall Street. 

 

Speaking at the CeBit trade show in Germany, Jim Hagemann Snabe and Bill McDermott distanced themselves from the management turmoil of recent weeks which saw former CEO Leo Apotheker ousted when the firm's board declined to renew his contract. 

 

The new SAP under the joint management of Snabe and McDermott will have less bureaucracy and a stronger focus on customer needs, they said, responding to criticism that in recent times the firm has wrong footed itself with a serious of self-inflicted wounds, such as its push to force customers onto a more expensive support scheme. 

 

Company co-founder Hasso Plattner admitted recently that customers lost trust in SAP and that it needed to be a "happy company" again. "We need to get the job done and do it in a way that inspires people. We want our customers to love us again. Everyone at SAP knows that if customers love you everything else takes care of itself,” said McDermott, with Snabe adding: “Trust is hard to build and easy to break … we are very confident we can build necessary ambition and mood within the company.”

 

 

The firm is moving to an organisational structure built around agile software development practices, The chief characteristic of this approach is the creation of small teams – in SAP's case, made up of ten people - that can work closely with customers and deliver frequent iterations of an application. This theoretically means that the final product meets user requirements more closely.

 

It's a radical shift in approach by SAP whose reputation has been for large engineering teams building systems that are shipped to customers and then customised by third party consultancies. "This methodology is not new, but so far it was only used by small companies, and we are scaling it to 12,000 engineers," said Snabe, adding that to date some 20% of the SAP developers are working in this way. "We want to transform SAP into a lean organisation, doing more with fewer people.”

 

A core element of the planned recovery will lie with a five-year plan for the low end Cloud offering, Business ByDesign.  "There is no doubt that companies like to consume software in an on-demand way," Snabe said."I do believe Business ByDesign is a significant opportunity for SAP and our customers. We're building a complete solution for them. The on-demand delivery model gives some unique capabilities like speed to market and that takes a big burden away.”

 

The shift to two CEOs is in fact a return to traditional SAP practice and both  men were keen to emphasise their closeness. "We speak daily," McDermott said. "Saturdays and Sundays too. It's obvious that two minds with different ways of thinking, but that both want SAP to be the greatest company can't possibly be bad. Jim and I have been together for many years now...we have many complementary skills, which is why this works so well. We're having fun.”