One of the first things SAP co-Chief Executive Officers Bill McDermott and Jim Hagemann Snabe did after taking over in February was to kill a long-running executive examination into corporate values.
The project was typical of the German business-software maker: top managers spending hours deliberating their approach to business. "Companies that are too internally focused are sick," McDermott said. "There's nothing healthy about being obsessed with your own internal nonsense. If there was a project that built bureaucracy into the company or required people to think about our internal stuff, we've killed those projects."
On May 12, McDermott and Snabe killed another sacred cow—the reluctance to make acquisitions—with the $5.8 billion deal for Dublin (Calif.)-based Sybase (SY), a maker of database and mobile-computing software.
SAP (SAP), based in Walldorf, Germany, will use the purchase to add business applications for customers that want employees to use tablets and smartphones at work, and database software widely used in finance and telecommunications. It helps SAP compete with Oracle (ORCL), whose chief executive officer, Larry Ellison, has spent more than $42 billion on 65 companies since 2005.
SAP's new bosses are taking a bolder approach than their predecessors. With the exception of SAP's 2007 purchase of Business Objects, the company's last two CEOs, Leo Apotheker and Henning Kagermann, largely eschewed big purchases.
"They're out to make their mark," said Joshua Greenbaum, principal of research firm Enterprise Applications Consulting, based in Berkeley, Calif. McDermott and Snabe are "planning to be a little more aggressive and dramatic than some of their predecessors."
On their watch, SAP is moving faster to release products. Companies including Siemens (SI), ExxonMobil (XOM), and Wal-Mart Stores (WMT) use SAP software to order goods, plan inventory levels and deliveries, and manage sales.
At SAP's Sapphire Now conference in Orlando and Frankfurt this week, the company announced July availability of a new version of its Business ByDesign Web software for midsize customers that also runs on Apple's (AAPL) iPhone and iPad. SAP showed new data analysis software that can yield instantaneous insights from millions of pieces of data.
"There has not been a shortage of innovation at SAP," said Chief Technology Officer Vishal Sikka, who joined the executive board in the February shakeup that cost Apotheker his job. "There has been a problem with bringing it to market rapidly."
In 2009, software license sales at SAP fell 28 percent and revenue declined 13 percent to $14.88 billion, as customers cut spending on computer systems during the recession. The company also announced its first big layoff.
SAP sales are expected to be $14.56 billion in 2010, according to analyst estimates compiled by Bloomberg. Shares of SAP have gained 5.3 percent in the past five years, compared with a 78 percent increase in Oracle stock. SAP fell 28 cents to 34.86 euros on May 20 on Deutsche Börse's Xetra trading platform.
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