SAP Shakes Up Board Following CEO’s Ouster

The reshuffling of SAP’s management suite continued Thursday when the German software giant named Gerhard Oswald as its new chief operating officer, replacing Erwin Gunst who resigned due to health issues.

Oswald, a nearly 30-year SAP veteran, was previously responsible for the company’s global service and support group and has served as an executive board member since 1996.

Also, SAP (NYSE: SAP) announced that John Schwarz, who served as CEO of Business Objects before SAP acquired Business Objects in 2007 for $6.7 billion, tendered his resignation from the company’s supervisory board, effective immediately.

The changes come less than a week after CEO Leo Apotheker resigned from the top postand was replaced by new co-CEOs Bill McDermott, formerly the company’s head of field organization, and Jim Hagemann Snabe, formerly SAP’s head of product development.

“The new composition of the SAP Executive Board and management changes will support the leadership structure of the co-CEOs announced earlier in the week,” co-founder and supervisory board chairman Hasso Plattner said in a statement.

“We regret that John Schwarz has decided to leave the company,” he added. “He has been instrumental in achieving the successful integration of Business Objects into SAP in record time and helping to build out SAP’s market leadership in business intelligence.”

SAP also announced that Peter Lorenz, executive vice president of small and midsized enterprises, has been named a corporate officer and will continue to report to Hagemann Snabe. Lorenz will oversee the development of a number of key products including its on-demand offering Business ByDesign.

The management reshuffling comes just over a month after SAP reported disappointing sales and earningsfor the year and a less-than-scintillating outlook for 2010.

Worse, customers have been particularly turned off by the company’s ill-timed decision to raise service and maintenance fees in a moribund economy and its failure to deliver Business ByDesign — and most of the key components originally promised — on time.

SAP shares trimmed $0.42, or 1 percent, to $42.88 in Thursday trading.

Larry Barrett is a senior editor at InternetNews.com, the news service of Internet.com, the network for technology professionals.

RELATED NEWS AND ANALYSIS

• Ethics and Artificial Intelligence: Driving Greater Equality

  FEATURE |  By James Maguire,
  December 16, 2020

• AI vs. Machine Learning vs. Deep Learning

  FEATURE |  By Cynthia Harvey,
  December 11, 2020

• Huawei’s AI Update: Things Are Moving Faster Than We Think

  FEATURE |  By Rob Enderle,
  December 04, 2020

• Keeping Machine Learning Algorithms Honest in the ‘Ethics-First’ Era

  ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE |  By Guest Author,
  November 18, 2020

• Key Trends in Chatbots and RPA

  FEATURE |  By Guest Author,
  November 10, 2020

• Top 10 AIOps Companies

  FEATURE |  By Samuel Greengard,
  November 05, 2020

• What is Text Analysis?

  ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE |  By Guest Author,
  November 02, 2020

• How Intel’s Work With Autonomous Cars Could Redefine General Purpose AI

  ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE |  By Rob Enderle,
  October 29, 2020

• Dell Technologies World: Weaving Together Human And Machine Interaction For AI And Robotics

  ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE |  By Rob Enderle,
  October 23, 2020

• The Super Moderator, or How IBM Project Debater Could Save Social Media

  FEATURE |  By Rob Enderle,
  October 16, 2020

• Top 10 Chatbot Platforms

  FEATURE |  By Cynthia Harvey,
  October 07, 2020

• Finding a Career Path in AI

  ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE |  By Guest Author,
  October 05, 2020

• CIOs Discuss the Promise of AI and Data Science

  FEATURE |  By Guest Author,
  September 25, 2020

• Microsoft Is Building An AI Product That Could Predict The Future

  FEATURE |  By Rob Enderle,
  September 25, 2020

• Top 10 Machine Learning Companies 2021

  FEATURE |  By Cynthia Harvey,
  September 22, 2020

• NVIDIA and ARM: Massively Changing The AI Landscape

  ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE |  By Rob Enderle,
  September 18, 2020

• Continuous Intelligence: Expert Discussion [Video and Podcast]

  ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE |  By James Maguire,
  September 14, 2020

• Artificial Intelligence: Governance and Ethics [Video]

  ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE |  By James Maguire,
  September 13, 2020

• IBM Watson At The US Open: Showcasing The Power Of A Mature Enterprise-Class AI

  FEATURE |  By Rob Enderle,
  September 11, 2020

• Artificial Intelligence: Perception vs. Reality

  FEATURE |  By James Maguire,
  September 09, 2020