Dream a little Dream: SAP Jam named leader in IDC Marketscape.
This one is personal. For me and everyone on our team.
IDC has just named SAP a leader in Enterprise Social Software and it represents another big milestone.
In the Spring of 2012 soon after I joined SAP, my product and sales teams gathered at a little motel off a Atlanta highway to white board how we would enter the market and become a leader in the cloud collaboration software business. SAP wasn’t known for collaboration software and we were 6 years late to this growing SaaS category. We charted out a war plan to create what we called high-velocity high-value growth but the kind that customers would really consider strategic fixes to their real business challenges. Challenges where collaborating in the context of a business activity could drive tangible results that mattered to executives and to end users.
Today, exactly 9 quarters after our launch in the Fall of 2013, with over 15 million subscribers, triple digit growth and well over 40 reference customers, IDC Research has named SAP a leader in its 2014 Market Scape Report for this category. This is the first time SAP has placed as leader in this software category and we’re totally honored.
I’m privileged to work with an incredibly tenacious team that put so much heart into every little detail and constantly embraced choices that very often went against the grain but kept us laser focused on our goal to fastest path to revenue and mad customer satisfaction. From the day when we went out guns blazing, to the launch of Work Patterns and finally to our Developer Platform launch, we executed ruthlessly and shipped over 7000 enhancements every thursday night for these past two years.
To everyone on our team – support, customer acceleration, sales and BD, engineering, QA, operations, UX, marketing, product, documentation, dev ops and our field organization – amazing, amazing, amazing. We dream’t big. And then you crushed it. – )
And this is just the start: the next set of milestones raises the bar even higher and are just as inspiring.
On a personal note, I have to thank Sanjay Poonen for recruiting me into SAP and to the Global Managing Board for giving our team the oxygen to drive this business for SAP. And this would have been a nonstarter had it not been for Successfactors founders Lars Dalgaard and Aaron Au who gave me the gig and the unfair advantage of learning from their experiences on how to operate and scale SaaS at every stage of our growth. You can’t put a price on that.
Here is a link to the press release and our blog post.
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