This continues a series of interviews with tech executives who have seen the industry evolve over a minimum of two decades. They have helped analyze, envision, develop and take to market some of the most influential technology the world has seen. And they have done it well mile after mile as elite athletes do. I am honored they spend the time with me reminiscing and star-gazing.
This time it is Rob Enslin, President, Cloud Business Group and member of the Executive Board at SAP. He has had a fascinating global career that spans multiple countries and generations of computing.
In Part 1 below,, he talks about his global experiences. In part 2 tomorrow, he will talk about the pace of change in tech and about his leadership style.
“I was on a fast track program to become a banking executive when I was very young. But I was never excited about what I was doing so I left the banking world and went on to study computer science. I was really engaged in information technology. First in the whole operations function and then writing assembler code in the '80s for loading and balancing ships' logistics vessels.
As time progressed, I became a systems engineer. In those days, it was configuring VM, VSE and MVS systems. I was good at building quadruple VSE systems on one virtual machine and then I became pretty much a specialist in CICS or "kicks," as many people call it, and databases.
Of the early databases, IMS DB was my forte. In the late '80s, I served as the expert that companies relied on to read dumps. When a computer system crashed, you created dumps. Some of the dumps were important to study because you had to put in patches, fixes and rebuild systems.
As time went on, I decided it was time for me to do something really big. I looked at three companies. One of them was Swiss Re who was looking for someone to run their local IT shop in South Africa. The other two were IBM and SAP. I went through the interview process really, really liking and feeling that there was something that would be exciting at SAP.
The attraction for SAP was my background as an expert in CICS and mainframe operating systems. Especially because the big oil and gas companies and many R/2 systems needed Assembler, CICS, MVS, and even IMS Db systems. Personally, what sold me on selecting SAP was that they were about to take R/3 to market and I would have the opportunity to work in Germany. My career got off to a fantastic start working in the SAP South Africa office with 11 other people. I was two weeks into the job, working in the office pretty much alone (as everyone else was with customers) and a call came in from Dr. Hasso Plattner's office. He said there's a customer who needs an R/2 expert onsite right away. So here I am driving to the customer thinking that this would be the end of my career. I thought, I've never seen an R/2 system and there’s no way on this planet that I would ever be able to fix the system.
Waiting for me at the front of this manufacturing facility is a big German named Gunter. He was the managing director in South Africa, and he meets me at the door and says, " I was promised that you're the expert that's going to come up, and you'll fix it for us." I was so nervous.
I got into the computer room which at that time had one main terminal, that everything ran off, and a bunch of folks around it who had been working on trying to figure it out. I sat down and was able to restore their system within a couple of minutes as just two months prior, I had the exact same situation at my previous job. So, I got to keep my job and do believe that experience got me my lucky break at SAP. Sometimes you just need a little luck because it could have easily gone the other way.
My next path was becoming a Basis consultant, which was mainly for R/2, but I spent the better part of early 1993 in Germany working with Uwe Hummel on R/3 release 1.1D learning UNIX networks and starting to build out the R/3 system. We spent time with people from around the world, coming together to test that system and make certain that it was ready for production. It was a fantastic opportunity to be in Germany and meet all my German colleagues, while at the same time work in South Africa.
I tell people that the early days (in late ’93, early ’94) were interesting because I still had some R/2 customers and yet here was all this amazing amount of interest in R/3. I always remember thinking to myself, these UNIX systems are really going to run these business systems and those mainframes are really going to struggle. People don't believe it, but I can see this happening again now with the cloud model.
During these years, you had to do everything from consulting to training to presales to even selling. Everybody - all 11 of us - had to chip in. I would not only do the full implementation, the folding up of these systems on different databases but I also went out in the morning to consult with the customers, do some presales, and then go on to do training. In some cases, I had to learn how to demo financials because we didn't have a financial expert, or the person wasn't arriving in the country until a week later. It was fascinating how quickly we all learned to grow with the full R/3 system.
Then, in 1994, I came to the U.S. to implement the first Windows NT system in Huntsville, Alabama. A South African boy who'd never been to the United States gets to go to Huntsville, Alabama, to implement R/3 on the first Windows NT system in the world on a Compaq machine. That's how scarce the resources were in the early days. When I came to the U.S., I really enjoyed being here and I waited for the opportunity to come back.
In late '96, I'd moved into sales in South Africa. I started selling simply because my view was if I was going to do presales and training and consulting, I might as well just do sales as well. In January of '97 I was asked to come back to the United States to help in the Coca-Cola account in Atlanta, Georgia. We helped rebuild the project scope, together with some amazing new leadership that Coca-Cola brought in, and in a very short period, just over a year, we went live.
We went live in a manufacturing facility in Ireland, in a financial region in Europe, and with corporate in Atlanta with over 5,500 users in 12 to 14 months. We descaled the project down from hundreds of people to less than 250 people. The lesson you learn is, less is more. You can be much more effective with a smaller, streamlined team. You get more done. You can do it faster. Decisions are quicker, and it makes a huge, enormous difference.
I stayed building out the Coca-Cola team through 1999. With that work, we founded SAP's Platinum accounts program. It was a program focused on the top 50 accounts in the world, how to manage them, what kind of resources you needed for them, how you move past the implementation and continue to manage the account across all aspects of the business. That was the start of a global management program for large accounts. I did that for two years with the top 50 accounts.
And then, there were changes in the North American markets. I had just been promoted to the executive management team in North America. Leo Apotheker became the acting president of North America, living in Europe, and we ran North America as an office of the CEO committee. With those changes, I ended up taking on all the manufacturing sales organization for North America, which was by far the largest sales organization. The first thing I did was align the right people behind me and made certain people knew I was kind of learning on the job but, at the same time, I was not afraid to take the job on.
At that point in time, they were looking for a president of North America, and that person came from outside. His name was Bill McDermott, and I was the first person to meet him as he was walking in the office, and it was unmistakable that he was the CEO. I remember the third floor of Newtown Square, Friday evening, I think it was about 8 o'clock at night and, for whatever reason, I walked out of my office, and I looked downstairs.
The place was empty, and I just saw this swashbuckling man walk, and I said, "That's the CEO of SAP North America." You just knew it. You could feel it. And, he came up, introduced himself exactly like he does today, with just tons of energy. He asked me a couple of questions and we hit it off. I continued to drive and help North America, running the northeast region from a sales perspective.
And then, in 2005, Leo asked me, "Hey, would you go to Japan for me?" I very clearly remember looking at him and saying, "I don't speak Japanese." And, he said to me, "I know that." And, so, yeah, so -- it was a Thursday night, and I was like, "Oh, shit. How do I tell my wife this?"
So, I called her and said, "You know, Leo has asked me to go to Japan to run Japan." I ended up buying every book possible at Borders, and every book on Japan and living in Tokyo. Sunday night, my wife said to me, "Okay, you've read every book possible. Are you going to say no?" I said, "Um--" and she says, "You're not going to say no." She said, "We're going to go, so just pick up the phone and tell him we're coming."
We spent three years there. My daughter graduated from high school and my son had a blast there. We turned the Japanese business around in a massive way. I learned a lot about the culture, and together we changed it into a real growth business for SAP - it was very, very successful. After three years, I came back to the U.S. as the chief operating officer, running Latin America and building out a fast growth markets plan. If you remember 2008, all companies had development and fast growth market plans.
And then, February the 1st of 2009, I had the great fortune of becoming the president of North America. The previous president resigned, and it was just after the markets collapsed, so this was an interesting time to become the president of the number one market for SAP in the world, and probably the most important market for SAP as everybody had stopped purchasing software.
There were a lot of concerns, not only by the people at SAP, but obviously when you read the news or the media or CNN. It was just negative. The banks were in trouble. The markets were in trouble, and so on. It was just a really, tough time.
I had this opportunity to figure out how to change this environment, how to turn it around from being a market that was going negative into a market that would stabilize and then start to grow again.
With that, we rebuilt our go-to-market strategy and we turned everything into selling to LOBs, building packages that were smaller, and changing the way we went to market. It took another six months before we saw the fruits of that. But, once it turned, it turned strongly, and I don't think SAP has ever looked back after that financial market meltdown.
We took the North American model and we drove it worldwide. That's why today, you see LOBs and SAP in multiple areas because the model allowed us not only to concentrate on the large, big deals or the big ERP deals, but really to drive a LOB-centric model because it was the only way to ensure that we had a baseline that we could grow the company.
In 2011, I took on global sales for SAP, and then I joined the management board in 2012. We've had a pretty good run in the last seven years, seeing the company grow from a market perspective. I spent a lot of time in those years building things that hopefully will continue to sustain SAP for many years. We built the sales academy, which now has over 2,500 graduates in the last 7 years and generated a whole new generation in the sales organization.
I think one of the things that really helped me was having had the breadth growing up and working in Africa, understanding Europe, living in Japan, running Latin America, being the president and, obviously, living in North America. It really helped me understand how to grow SAP at a global scale for many years. And so, we've always had a great balance between regions in terms of our growth strategies and what markets grow faster than others.
In 2017, I stepped down from the head of global sales and two wonderful candidates who one had run North America for me, one had run Asia, stepped up to the board and are doing a phenomenal job continuing to drive SAP's sales organization and customer focus while I moved to build out our cloud strategy and all of our cloud business efforts.
A key word for 2019 - authenticity
Happy New Year to all my readers!
I have spent the last month extracting from hundreds of pages of transcripts of my interviews for SAP Nation 3.0. I am struck by the frank comments from so many customers about SAP, its partners and its competitors. They realize these will be read by their peers at other customers and I appreciate their willingness to share. I know some of the comments will be used for competitive advantage. Fair warning to folks in the field – if you use it that way, bear in mind I have similar access to your customers and information about your products :)
Similarly, reading my notes from meetings with Franck Cohen, Rob Enslin, Nick Tzitzon and others at SAP, I see an openness which is refreshing. I give credit to Stacey Fish, my contact at SAP. She sets up calls/meetings and mostly observes even when we may be ganging up on her execs. She may ask me what I thought afterwards, but rarely does she push an overt agenda.
So, here is my request of other vendors – converse more with us, don’t just pitch. Don’t just outbound communicate to us, invite our inbound requests. Open up more access to your customers. I love how Plex invites us to join their Customer Advisory Board once a year. If not, not to worry, we can access customers through many other channels.
But do encourage your execs to be authentic. On that point, I see a trend for executives to talk about corporate “purpose”. I admire executive commitment to diversity and social good, but in the end as an analyst I am expected to focus on functionality, architecture and economics. When I talk to customers rarely do they say “corporate purpose” was the reason they selected a vendor. It may have been a tie breaker, rarely a item which counts for more than 10% in their scoring matrix.
On the other hand on functionality, architecture and economics I expect many more detailed conversations. As you will read in the book, SAP is in far better shape than people give it credit for. But SAP, its partners and its competitors have all missed out on many, many market opportunities in the last decade.
It’s a new year, and a very new market. Look forward to many more conversations.
January 02, 2019 in Industry Commentary | Permalink | Comments (0)