Julia White and Scott Russell to Depart SAP

UPDATE: Julia White has joined Amazon Web Services as the Marketing Chief. Read more here.

SAP announced on July 30^th, 2024 that Chief Marketing and Solutions Officer Julia White and Chief Revenue Officer Scott Russell would be departing the company’s Executive Board as of August 31^st. Given that SAP had just reported another very strong quarterly performance, the news that two board members who have contributed significantly to this success would be departing is somewhat surprising, although Russell did not join last week’s earnings call as he has done regularly in the past.

White joined SAP in 2021 from Microsoft where she was the Chief Marking Officer for Microsoft Azure. In leading Marketing and Solutions, White brought together Product Marketing and Global Marketing teams into a single organization that was focused on supporting SAP’s cloud-first model. When White joined the SAP Executive Board, this was the first time that Marketing had been directly represented at that level.

Although the press release does not detail what changes will occur when White leaves, it does say that SAP is planning to “strengthen the synergy between product marketing and product teams by bringing those teams together”. Ironically, this is the organizational structure that existed prior to White joining the SAP Executive Board where Product Marketing teams reported through the same management structure as Product Engineering teams. While alignment calls are planned for many marketing teams at SAP today, it seems that the plan is to have Global Marketing teams return to the CEO board area as was also the case prior to White joining SAP.

Russell has a much longer tenure with SAP having first joined the company in 2010. Prior to joining the Executive Board in 2021 and leading the Board area for Customer Success, Russell was the President of SAP Asia Pacific Japan. When Russell joined the Executive Board, he replaced Adaire Fox-Martin in the role of board member for Customer Success. The previous three Executive Board members for Customer Success were Jennifer Morgan, Rob Enslin, and Bill McDermott, who all came through the SAP Americas organization. CEO Christian Klein will have interim responsibility for leading SAP’s sales organization.

SAP’s press release stated that “a search for Russell’s successor is underway”, but a similar statement was not made regarding White. This implies, as indicated earlier, that Marketing will no longer be directly represented on the SAP Executive Board. Product Marketing teams will be embedded in Product Engineering organizations, and Global Marketing will report through the Office of the CEO. These changes appear to be a return to the structure that existed when Alicia Tillman, Maggie Chan Jones, and Jonathan Becher were Chief Marketing Officers for SAP.

Both Klein and Pekka Ala-Pietilä, the recently elected Chairman of the Supervisory Board of SAP SE, thanked White and Russell for their accomplishments and contributions. Ala-Pietilä also stated that the “in the context of SAP’s ongoing successful cloud transformation, the SAP Supervisory Board believes that now is the moment to embark on the next era of growth”. What this will mean for the future structure of the SAP Executive Board remains to be seen.