Julia White, Scott Russell to leave SAP executive board
Two executive board members will depart SAP in a move that the company says is both to streamline the structure of the board and to focus on its AI-first strategy.
SAP's restructuring continues to shake up the executive ranks as Julia White, chief marketing and solutions officer, and Scott Russell, head of sales, are leaving the German ERP giant.
The SAP supervisory board said today that White and Russell have reached a "mutual agreement" to leave SAP's executive board on August 31, well ahead of last year's contract extension for both executives to 2027. In a press release, SAP described the news as a "strategic transition" and said it was streamlining the structure of its executive board to focus on its "Suite- and AI-first strategy."
A search for Russell's replacement is underway, and SAP CEO Christian Klein will lead the sales organization while that goes on, according to the company. There are no immediate plans to replace White.
White joined SAP in March 2021 after spending almost 20 years in executive marketing roles at Microsoft, which included leading product marketing for Azure. She was subsequently elevated to the SAP executive board, the first time that SAP had placed marketing at board level.
White was a prominent presence at SAP's customer events, hosting and delivering sessions and keynote addresses at its annual Sapphire conference.
Russell joined SAP in 2010 after holding executive roles at IBM. He served as president of SAP Asia Pacific Japan prior to becoming chief revenue officer and joining the executive board in 2021.
"By prioritizing these key areas, SAP is positioning itself to further expand its position as a leading enterprise software company," the company stated in the press release.
SAP did not provide specific reasons why White and Russell left the company or why they would not be part of its "transformation." White's departure will leave Gina Vargiu-Breuer, chief people officer and labor director, as the only female member of the SAP executive board.
The departures are the latest in a significant restructuring of the executive board in 2024. In April, SAP created a new executive board area focused on customer success and cloud adoption, headed by Thomas Saueressig, and appointed Muhammad Alam to the board, succeeding Saueressig as the head of product engineering. Alam served as president and chief product officer at the SAP Intelligent Spend business group.
Leadership transition at critical juncture
The exits of White and Russell are coming at a critical time for SAP, as it still struggles to move its large customer base from legacy SAP ECC and S/4HANA on-premises systems to S/4HANA Cloud, according to analysts.
Despite doing well financially, as evidenced by its second quarter earnings report July 22, the sluggish migration continues to loom as an existential threat to SAP, according to Joshua Greenbaum, principal at Enterprise Applications Consulting.
"Fundamentally, this issue of migration is so important, and the sense is that White and Russell weren't dealing with it," Greenbaum said.
White's marketing approach does not appear to have been in sync with SAP's needs, which was first indicated when the earlier restructuring of the executive board removed some solutions marketing in favor of Saueressig's newly created board area, he said.
"[White's] marketing focus was very much digital and not enough in-person and is very much trying to sell bundled software the way you sell Office and not the way you have to sell complicated enterprise software," Greenbaum said. "I don't think that was meeting the needs of the large enterprise customers that have been the core of SAP for so many years."
One manifestation of this approach has been a downgrading of in-person events such as SAP TechEd for developers and SuccessConnect for SAP SuccessFactors customers in favor of more digitally oriented marketing touch points, he said.
"There was a lack of an understanding that there's a community made up of people who need to come together regularly and rub shoulders, this focus on metrics was to the detriment of a focus on in-person events and that might have been a factor," Greenbaum said.
The latest exits from the SAP leadership ranks are somewhat surprising, but not unusual given SAP's past executive moves, said Liz Herbert, an analyst at Forrester Research.
There have been many examples where Germany-based technology and engineering-centric executives last longer in SAP leadership than non-Germany-based leaders with backgrounds in sales and marketing, Herbert said.
"For example, Jennifer Morgan had a fairly short stint as co-CEO [with Klein starting in late 2019], having come up from a more sales-heavy background," she said.
But ultimately, SAP's migration issues might have been the deciding factor in White's and Russell's exits, Herbert said.
"I suspect some of this is also that, despite the appearance of good numbers in the recent earnings call, the shift to S/4HANA still has lots of challenges," she said.
Jim O'Donnell is a senior news writer for TechTarget Editorial who covers ERP and other enterprise applications.
