SMALL STEPS, BIG PLANS

摘要

It's fitting that bill mcdermott's first major product announcement as SAP America's president and CEO involved a set of applications for businesses with as few as 10 employees. At SAP, whose software is synonymous with megaprojects, the emphasis now is on smaller, faster, and cheaper engagements. The challenge for SAP America's new leader is to show other companies that SAP can help them become lean and limber, while the vendor bulks up its sales in the process. The German software company's introduction in New York last week of SAP Business One―a suite of enterprise resource planning apps for small and midsize companies, delivered in partnership with American Express Co.―was a coming-out party of sorts for McDermott, who joined SAP six months ago from Siebel Systems Inc., where he was executive VP of worldwide sales operations. McDermott has been busy building an executive team to make SAP America a harder-driving, more customer-focused company. His latest hire is Oracle veteran John Nugent, who will oversee SAP America's sales team. "That's a big hire for us," McDermott said in an interview last week from SAP America's headquarters in Newton Square, Pa. "This exec had to understand the customer, enterprise apps, and had to be a person that fit into our culture―a person who values the customer."