SAP's Hiring Of Ex-Oracle Fusion Guru Shows It Means Business In The SaaS World
SAP confirmed that the Walldorf, Germany-based company has hired Wookey as executive vice president of large enterprise on-demand software. In that role, Wookey will help "organize SAP's on-demand product road map under a single strategy solely for large enterprise customers," a spokesman said in an e-mail.
Wookey officially started on Monday, Nov. 10. He reports to board member Jim Hagemann Snabe, who heads up SAP's Business Solutions and Technology operation.
Wookey spent 12 years at Oracle, where he was senior vice president of applications development and was leading the company's efforts to develop its Fusion next-generation application set. But Wookey left Oracle late last year for reasons that were never disclosed.
At the enterprise level, SAP's SaaS offerings are largely limited to the SAP CRM On-Demand application and on-demand business-intelligence software from its Business Objects subsidiary.
The company also developed the SAP Business ByDesign line of on-demand applications targeting the midmarket. But SAP has run into problems developing a profitable model for selling and hosting those applications. The SAP spokesman said Wookey won't be involved with the Business ByDesign effort.
SAP debuted the CRM On-Demand applications in 2006, a move widely seen as an effort to jump-start CRM application sales among owners of its flagship ERP software and prevent defections to rivals like Salesforce.com. SAP's focus then still seemed to be on large-scale, on-premise applications.
Hiring Wookey to oversee development of SaaS applications for big companies proves that's no longer the case. Wookey is one of the industry's most respected application development executives and his appointment means that SAP is indeed serious about the on-demand application world. It will be interesting to see how the company's SaaS strategy develops over the next several years.