Jürgen Müller to Step Down from SAP Executive Board
Meet the Experts
Key Takeaways
⇨ CTO Jürgen Müller will depart SAP effective September 30, 2024.
⇨ The departure is predicated by inappropriate behavior at a past company event.
⇨ Müller will be the third executive board member to depart in a month.
In an unexpected development, SAP has announced that Chief Technology Officer (CTO) Jürgen Müller will depart the SAP Executive Board effective September 30th, 2024. According to the press release, Müller is departing due to inappropriate behavior at a company event. In a quote, Müller said that his actions “did not reflect our values at SAP” and that he would “take full responsibility and believes that stepping down is the best for the company”.
Müller joined the SAP Executive Board in 2019 as CTO and in that role has led SAP’s platform and development unit. This has been crucial for SAP over the last 5 years because Müller has helped drive the integration of acquired companies such as SAP Concur, SAP Ariba, and SAP Fieldglass into the broader SAP ecosystem. Muller was also instrumental in the expansion and success of SAP Integration Suite, the transformation of SAP Cloud Platform into SAP Business Technology Platform (BTP), and SAP’s push towards data federation with SAP Datasphere. These efforts have helped provide SAP with a platform that is aligned and integrated with SAP S/4HANA and on which many SAP customers are building their future landscapes.
Müller is the third SAP Executive Board member to depart SAP in the last month, with Chief Marketing and Strategy Officer Julia White and Chief Revenue Officer (CRO) Scott Russell both exiting the company on August 31st, 2024. To many SAP insiders the departure of White was not entirely unexpected, but Russell had driven SAP to multiple successive quarters of strong cloud growth. Müller’s departure is also a major surprise and represents a significant change in the structure of the SAP Executive Board over a very short period.
Regardless of whether some of these board level changes were planned, the departure of half of SAP’s Executive Board in such a short period will likely result in a loss of focus and momentum for SAP. SAP is returning to its former marketing structure and will not be replacing White at the board level as the new Chief Marketing Officer will report into Christian Klein and the office of the Chief Executive Officer (CEO). SAP is conducting a search for a new CRO and may look outside the company to find a leader that can help refocus and restructure SAP’s sales organization to better match its goal of becoming a cloud first company.
Müller will be harder to replace. Having joined SAP in 2013, Müller served as Head of the Innovation Center Network, Managing Director of SAP Labs Berlin, and Chief Innovation Officer before moving to the Executive Board. This gave him a significant depth and understanding of SAP’s products and solutions. SAP’s new CTO will need to have a similar depth of knowledge if they are to effectively lead the platform and development organization. This suggests that SAP will need to look internally for Müller’s replacement. SAP has some strong leaders, but SAP’s last two CTO’s have been based in Walldorf and that may well eliminate some potential candidates.
What Does This Mean for SAPinsiders?
Most customers will likely not be directly impacted by Müller’s departure. However, the changes at the board level cannot help but be disruptive for SAP. Nearly half of the executive board will have departed SAP by the end of September. Of those remaining, Thomas Saueressig has only been in his new role leading Customer Services and Delivery for a few months, and Chief People Officer Gina Vargiu-Breuer and head of SAP Product Engineering Muhammad Alam only joined the board in 2024. In addition, Chief Financial Officer Dominik Asam joined both SAP and the Executive Board in 2023, which leaves CEO Christian Klein as the only board member with more than a year of tenure in their current role.
In addition, Klein will be assuming interim responsibilities for Müller’s organization except for the SAP Global Security and Cloud Compliance team which be joining Saueressig’s board area. This will place a significant burden on Klein who had already taken responsibility for White’s board area and has likely been playing a bigger role in sales with Russell departing. While this is only for the short term, Müller’s board area has thousands of members and needs a dedicated leader.
The biggest impact Müller has had during his tenure as CTO was bringing together multiple offerings with SAP Cloud Platform to create SAP BTP. SAP BTP is essential to SAP’s vision of the future that puts SAP BTP, SAP Cloud ALM, SAP Signavio, and SAP LeanIX around the ERP core. While SAP may be pushing SAP S/4HANA Cloud and RISE with SAP recently, the upsell that SAP has achieved with RISE with SAP customers has often been with SAP BTP services. Without Müller to help continue this vision SAP risks losing momentum in the medium term. This makes it vital for Müller’s replacement to understand where the organization is going, and SAP will need to move quickly to ensure that happens.
Overall, organizations should prepare for some disruption in SAP messaging and what SAP has been trying to achieve, although the push for cloud ERP and RISE with SAP will continue. What is less clear is what message SAP will bring to TechEd which has for some time been led by the organization’s CTO.
