Thread regarding SAP layoffs

This company is smart; they understood a good way to do attrition in a company like SAP: put the maximum people under a manager like Utkarsh Bahadur and most of people will go by themselves.

Is the Scott Russell’s gang heading to NICE? Would be nice

The person Julia brought in to "lead" corporate marketing won't make it until the end of the year. Most of those hires are b-ms.

Would be great if they got rid of all of the Microsoft hires they brought over, since none of them had experience selling complex software or managing large teams. Including into Channel. Seems only outsiders from MSFT know how to market, and people with SAP tenure are seen as lazy and complacent. Replaced a decent culture with one of fear and caused constant upheaval with a lot of top down processes to make it seem like a big transformation. Wish Julia's departure would strike fear into some of her hires/people the way it has done for SAPers since she came and kept moving goal posts.

Why is this a mystery? 50% of S/4 customer are NNN. Of the remaining 50%, early adopters went greenfield and Hyperscalers. Some regions report 80% of S/4 are on-premise or hyperscaler hosted. Not rise or grow. Only recently are conversions and RISE catching up.

The partners and SAP services - premium and consulting - can't and won’t move the install base.

SAP will blink next year - ECC EOL ‘27 or ‘30 is the decision. Christian de-Klein is the next to go.

I’m not sure what the dispute was about but it must be significant to want someone to leave so badly that you’ll pay their entire salary/bonus/other entitlements through 2027. I heard that Jen Morgan left over a difference in strategy (she wanted to align fully with MSFT I heard). Maybe Scott simply pointed out that the revenue projections were overly ambitious or there are plans to gut the sales teams in high cost countries. Not sure but again, must have been such a significant difference such that Scott had to leave…..I leave this mystery to cleverer minds than mine.

@dngt+1tLt9tMR

Well be honest, what was the reason in your opinion?

No doubt they are looking at the commission paid to sales and eager to move any commission based role to a low cost country, and have as many customers as possible supported “digitally”.
There’s no way SAP will make the ambitious revenue targets in 2027, but it must have been a doozy of a disagreement to have CK prefer to get rid of Scott since he will be paid his compensation package through 2027.

What to think about a company where everyone is now scared to be promoted? There used to be a time when getting a T5 was the goal for everyone but I now hear everyone in this company say they don’t want to have a target in their back. Only a few “friends and family” are keeping high profile jobs, people hate them, and I see even them liking posts of competitors on LinkedIn, trying to escape from this awful so called “transformation”. CK has surrounded himself with ex-consultants with little experience in software and given them disproportionate power and management roles. the hunt for experienced people is on, youngism is the philosophy, especially for these managers with no content and skills who don’t want to be challenged by people who know one thing or 2. Easier to bullsh-t interns and young professionals. This disastrous policy will not show its effects immediately considering the run rate and momentum, but sooner or later the company will pay the price that it turned against its most loyal and competent employees.
Julia and Scott have been active complicit in these changes as they care only about themselves.

Don’t think that Scott or Julia cares at this point. They will be paid out for their contract through 2027 and will be just fine, which is way more than I can say for those impacted by the layoffs.

Scott had the genius idea of merging EMEA North and South - it’s been a disaster and we lost (forced out) a lot of good people - and he’s not even going to see it through?

This is a great article that actually has depth, the quoted analysts pretty much agree with our sentiments. The lack of interest in migrating to the cloud amongst customers is a concern they raise. Well worth a read.

https://www.techtarget.com/searchsap/news/366599068/Julia-White-Scott-Russell-to-leave-SAP-executive-board

What the heck is an Utkarsh?

Sounds like a name of a bad movie from the 1990s

Where do these people come from?
What do they do all day?

Now that JW and Scott Russell are eliminated, it will now be much easier to reduce marketing and sales headcounts with minimal resistance at the board level. I would be very afraid if I am in marketing or customer success, maybe start looking for a new job while there are openings available in other companies.

Utkarsh Bahadur's team is weird too.. his original team members are all individual contributors and now they manage over 50+ hc teams... wondering how they develop team management skills overnight

Can we make sure Utkarsh Bahadur and a few others go with them?

The wheel is turning and it’s only fair since both did a lot of harm to the company. Neither of them knew what they were doing. Such selfish people. Julia is a pure woke, full of herself, incompetent. Scott is a crook: only friends and family. He was able to manipulate and seduce CK when he came to Asia and was so excited to wear local costumes like the child he is. But everyone in APJ know how much of a mafia leader he is, bending rules to his benefits, firing people from one day to the other who he was getting scared they could speak out about who he truly was, and replacing them with members of his close gang. Neither of them will be missed. They were just other mistakes CK did since he took the job.

Marketing LOB will be taken over by Sales LOB, gone will be the extravagant set up of having "Global" Marketing and "Field" Marketing teams embedded all around every region and now there will be HC cuts galore.

Was nice when times were good and there was fiefdom between the Lords of Marketing like Marty Homlish and all the regional heads which led to ridiculous duplicative costs all over the place, but that was yesterday and this is today.

As they say, all good things come to an end.

@ @1ysh+1tLt9tMR: Perfect summation.

To drop two board members and not replacing one of them is clear sign that much more changes are in the pipeline.

With no leader assuming the Marketing LOB going forward, we can expect big, big changes on this Board area. Sales will be responsible and in the true spirit of the Sales LOB they will cut the throat of Marketing to save themselves and make their Quarterly results look good due to HC cuts on Marketing LOB.

Look for Marketing strategy to be outsourced to a third party agency where Sales only pays for the services they want as well as all Event and Media buy being handled by outside agencies.

JW had no clue what she was doing and when you add up all of the internal costs of Marketing as well as the budget for Events, Media, advertisement she was handling a monumental amount of money and what to show for it?? and now the remaining LOB will feel the impacts.

More now than ever before, Hasso pulls all strings. Years past with Henning and McD in place Hasso didn't get too involved with D2D biz. He also now more than in the past has to please the shareholders as he wants to leave on his own account vs being pushed out the door.

So with CK and also given Hasso's age and how realizing how much longer he can be involved, he's taking much more involvement in decisions.

Marketing and Sales go hand in hand. Hasso was never one to see much value in the Marketing LOB and Sales org has gotten completely out of hand with the enormous number of HC they are holding, Hasso stepped in to gain some internal improvement on "Net Profit".

“Scott, being an Aussie, resigned in sympathy with his fellow board member, Julia.”

Scott has never shown anything other than the tired cliche of the “Tech Exec” being all inspirational as they pace the stage and fail to pump us all up with meaningless verbiage. He is full of the the latest buzzwords and phrases, I’ve just never seen anything approaching natural come out of his mouth.

The faux gravitas and empathy he showed when “addressing” the layoff issue was completely insulting. He just checked that one off the list and rest of his presentation was the usual BS. So I doubt that he resigned in sympathy because JW got canned.

Enough has already been written about JW already and I don’t need to add to it. Scott and JW are just two empty vessels that sc--wed SAP over for a few million euros, while (At the very least) acquiescing to the layoffs of 13K employees since 2023.

It seems like Julia's board area being absorbed by others is a clear sign that there was no effective transition plan in place. My guess is that this decision was influenced by the unfiltered survey results where she got poor feedback.

Scott, being an Aussie, resigned in sympathy with his fellow board member, Julia. Interestingly, we heard from Scott but not from Julia, and this all happened while the company was in a strong position in terms of stock and earnings.

The big question now is: who will fill Scott's role, and will they stick with the CBO transition? Considering the organization's size, we really don't need it...

The organization should consider going back to having each Line of Business President/GM define their own go-to-market strategy. This way, they can target all customers without cannibalizing each other.

Meanwhile the muppet CEO and the dimwitted CFO just keep on with their pointless buffoonery.

Next will be all sales and customer support roles in high cost ( US) will be transferred to one of the Shared Service Centers.

Corporate Marketing will be folded into Sales org and be led by an outside agency with an outside Executive Advisor ( like Marty Homlish under contract) combined with deep cuts to existing folks.

Tech is now a cutthroat biz and SAP decided to leave its legacy biz that it was built on of selling ERP platforms that nobody could compete with and get into the world of cloud operators where we go against mom and pop companies.... we will have to shed an awful lot of overhead to be successful in this new environment.

This time next year, will be a totally different company here.

Now down to 5 Germans and 1 American on the exec board. Be careful Mr. MA.

please take JG and Ada with you. horrible. just so arrogant and empty.

@hhi+1tLt9tMR

IT company with No sales and devs ? 😂

Julia is expected-but why scott now ?

Just a power move to transfer these 2 board seats to germany ?

So now we know which two Board areas will have the first decimations on headcount.   

 As  the old saying goes: "first cut the head off the snake and the body will die".....

Since the Sales area has the most HC  overall in SAP and Marketing supports it, we will see '000's  in these two area let go by end of year.

The rung below her (the hand picked LT) is worse

@iga+1tLt9tMR We're talking about her "AI-infused, peeps startups" LI post?

Good riddance. I have only contempt for their AHC on the Bloomberg story and two colleagues as--ulted by another employee.

She was easily one of the least impressive leaders to ever spend time at SAP

Completely over her head marketing our software and solutions

Covered up for it by her silly linked in posts . Total farce.

Good riddance to her

She will not be missed