SAP is consolidating several cloud, analytical, mobile innovation developments under Vishal Sikka. That's a good move. For a while now, I have watched him focus a bit too much on HANA - "his baby" as he calls it, while leadership for other innovation assets has been somewhat fragmented. Hopefully, other areas such as social analytics, Internet of Things etc will also be part of the brief, though consolidating disparate Ariba, SuccessFactors, BYD and other development teams will take some time.
Even more importantly, I see Gerhard Oswald is leading a Scale, Quality and Support board area which will scale the operations of SAP HANA Enterprise Cloud. Honestly I have been unimpressed with SAP's data center/infrastructure strategy around its BYD and SuccessFactors clouds. Be nice to see SAP build scale and economics which start to bring to the enterprise what larger consumer clouds have been offering for a while now. (see The Shock and Awe of the Public Cloud)
There's another move SAP should think about. Create a seperate field organization around these new products. The exisiting field has not done well with these new products (only 6.5% of 2012 revenues after years of product availiability). The older SAP partners are, well, old and tired as the services space gets revitalized by a number of boutiques (see my note Outsourcing: The Seismic Changes).
