News Analysis - SAP appoints a CTO - some musings

On November 10th SAP announced the hiring of a new CTO, Quentin Clark, joining the product team working for Bernd Leukert immediately.
 

So let’s dissect the press release our usual news analysis style:

WALLDORF — SAP SE today announced that Quentin Clark will join the company as Chief Technology Officer, effective November 10, 2014.

As SAP’s technology ambassador, he will drive direction and vision of SAP’s future technology and shape SAP’s brand as the technology leader. Clark will report to Bernd Leukert, Member of the Executive Board of SAP SE, Products & Innovation, and will be based in Palo Alto.
MyPOV – Back when Vishal Sikka decided to leave SAP, we speculated about a new CTO joining SAP. We expected a similar position to report to CEO Bill McDermott, but now we see Clark joining SAP working for the head of product, Leukert. Clark has spent almost 20 years at Microsoft, with a long term tenure around MS SQL Server and the BI products. He reported to Satya Nadella before his recent appointment to CEO and now made a move (Microsoft has not clarified who will succeed him to my knowledge). Interesting is also the addition of ‘shape SAP’s brand as the technology leader’ – brand shaping is usually marketing’s job – so we will have to learn from SAP more about this more unusual addition of responsibilities for a CTO.

Clark joins SAP from Microsoft. In his role as corporate vice president of Microsoft’s Data Platform Group, he was responsible for design and delivery of Microsoft’s data platform products. He also led the development of the transformation of the data platform to the cloud, delivering the first wave of Microsoft Azure’s Data Platform products. Prior to becoming corporate vice president, he held various roles in Microsoft’s development since 1994.
MyPOV – So SAP hired a proven RDBMS veteran. Interesting as with HANA it has a quite unique approach to RDBMS, so hiring an executive coming from the co-existence world of on disk and in memory capabilities is an interesting move. But then the press release is void of any mention of HANA, did the SAP board and Leukert maybe look for an experienced executive to run the former Sybase and Business Objects portfolios? The coming weeks will show.

But it’s also clear that SAP has not looked for an enterprise applications veteran, but a technology veteran – more about that below.

“I am very pleased to have Quentin join SAP,” said Leukert. “He is not only an impressive technologist who thrives on pursuing a meaningful vision but at the same time a passionate leader. He enjoys taking a full view of business, technology, product, team and customers. I am sure that Quentin will significantly contribute to shaping and executing our technology strategy and turning opportunities into innovation — and help our customers to Run Simple.”
MyPOV – My guess is that Clark was handpicked by Leukert and should help him deal with US development activities as well as customers, as such he must have his trust to be his ‘voice’ in the North American market – that is both key for SAP in technology and enterprise aspects. There is a recruiting aspect in one article coveing the news here, according to Personnel Chief Stefan Ries, but I give that little impact, unless we see an exodus of former Microsoft employees follow Clark. I would be surprised if SAP and Microsoft executives did not swap courtesy calls around this Clark’s move.

Overall MyPOV

There is a few takeaways that can derived beyond a dose of speculation:

• McDermott trusts Leukert as the product leader. A CTO hire reporting to him would put McDermott in the decision making field around any (positive and necessary) tension between a forward looking CTO and Product Leader.

• Leukert needed a trusted manager in North America, both as a face to customers, prospects, and SAP employees. With Leukert’s enterprise software background, Clark brings on a technology perspective that wasn’t there before – at least not exposed at senior management level in a CTO position.

• SAP becomes more about applications (as we predicted here) – as the CTO role is now less exposed and report to a more enterprise application minded executive. And the de-facto CTO role (though not nominally called like this) falls anyway to Bjoern Gerke as the executive in charge of the SAP PaaS and SaaS platforms.

• Clark’s relative novelty to the world of enterprise applications will avoid or at least delay any potential directional discussions on technology strategy, which is good short term for SAP as the HANA strategy is set – but long term has the risk that SAP is heading to a ‘unique’ path to the cloud (as blogged here). And a unique path that SAP has taken before when moving to a client server architecture has its risks but also rewards. 

Probably (and hopefully) a good move for SAP, that has not been able to retain senior experienced executives from acquired entities in the past (Schwartz, Chen, Couturier – quick who was Sybase’s CTO?), so now it is time to recruit from the outside. The next quarters will tell – really curious on the brand aspect of Clark’s role.

Footnote: On the Microsoft side the question is of course, why did Clark leave (we may never know) and how his responsibilities will be organized. It is noticeable how briefly Clark is featured in the News Center (see here), last entry in November 2012. Running database and application platform is short tenured position – measured in the otherwise long tenures of the company – with former head of the group Ted Kummer leaving in early 2013. But let’s hear more from Microsoft.