Second Anniversary at SAP
Today, April 2nd, marks my 2nd anniversary at SAP.
I wrote this when I joined to describe what I felt was the opportunity to really change how work gets done. Few get the chance to define and execute a product and go-to-market strategy at a large company such as SAP. I’m privileged to be one of the few who has had the opportunity to do so.
To say that a lot has happened in the last 2 years would be an understatement. But this is what it winnows down to:
– SAP is one of the more collaborative cultures I’ve experienced and it would be silly to think that we would have achieved the kind of growth we did without a genuine willingness to want to continuously bring more value to the customer. Our counterparts in other on-premise and cloud teams have been great partners. And Bill and Vishal’s team have continuously removed roadblocks from day one.
– An amazing high performing products, engineering and go-to-market team that I’m privileged to be a part of. We came from behind in our category of collaboration software, put a practical product strategy in place, worked with over 50 practitioners, and 6000+ updates later, built stuff that mattered to customers.
– A maniacal discipline around Cloud economics. I have the unfair advantage of working closely with Aaron Au, co-founder of Successfactors, and this gave our teams intimate access to the learnings from building Successfactors brick by brick. And working through every Successfactors ops review with Lars in the room was an incredible SaaS boot camp for me soon after I joined. You just can’t put a price on this.
– An amazing sales team that saw the value of what we brought to the table and has outdone itself every single quarter. A big thanks to Rob Enslin, Shawn Price and Jonathan Becher and their teams for having faith in our products.
It’s been one heck of a ride these past 8 quarters. 12 million SAP Jam subscribers, some of the largest brands in the world, triple digit growth and our new work patterns offering that puts neither process nor social software but the end users day to day needs at the center of the experience.
I’m truly one fortunate guy to have been through this experience.
There’s so much more to do going forward. Digitization and automation of process is largely complete – Our data, connections, content and processes are now all digital. This next chapter of figuring out how to pragmatically transform the way we work and how we connect with customers and partners is going to be an incredible journey for those of us in the world of enterprise software. I’m looking forward to working through this with my colleagues in the larger enterprise software community.
A final thanks to our team at SAP. You raise the bar for what constitutes the very definition of an A-team, every day.
