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Facing uncertainty over its plans to win back customer satisfaction, SAP Co-Chief Executives Bill McDermott and Jim Hagemann Snabe, arrived in Silicon Valley this week looking to set the record straight.
Their joint appearance comes as the company tries to stem a sales slump which ultimately led to the ouster of their predecessor Leo Apotheker in February.
A key message the chiefs looked to get across is that the world’s largest maker of business applications software can still be nimble. It is taking steps to increase the pace of software development so that it can respond to customers’ needs faster.
Speaking at the company’s Palo Alto campus, Snabe and McDermott, also said the company is not looking to make any blockbuster acquisitions – an obvious swipe at its main rival Oracle, which has pursued a rapid acquisition strategy.
So exactly how is SAP going to speed software development? The co-chiefs say the company has shifted about 20% of its 12,000 software engineers to an “agile” development process. The agile development method incorporates smaller teams and more frequent iterations of software, and is combined with checks to ensure the software is meeting customers’ requirements.
Snabe noted that a new version of the company’s Business By Design software has been built using two-thirds of the number of engineers required by a previous edition. He also claimed the new Business By Design release was of a higher quality as a result of the agile development method.
As the new software development process is tested and refined, SAP plans to role it out to the rest of its development workforce.
The approach being taken by Snabe and McDermott, appears to be a direct attempt to show the company is setting a different course than that set by Apotheker. Apotheker had been criticized for focusing too much on sales at the expense of customer satisfaction and innovation.
The approach should be welcomed by customers who are increasingly wondering if SAP is investing enough in new technologies such as cloud computing.
The German software giant had a shot of positive news earlier this month, when it announced it had landed one of the world's largest brands, St. Paul, Minn.-based 3M, as a customer for a global rollout. SAP said 3M has selected its SAP Business Suite 7 software as a replacement platform for a number of legacy platforms installed in its sites around the world.
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