Maureen O'Gara

SAP Session at Cloud Expo

Cloud Computing Expo - In a surprise move, SAP CEO Leo Apotheker, in the job on his own only eight months, has resigned after it became clear that his contract, not up until the end of the year, wasn't going to be extended. At least that's the way the company phrased it.

Oracle's great competitor said Apotheker and its supervisory board came to a "mutual agreement." It did not say why.

SAP is going back to the "two in a box" model and has named the head of its field organization Bill McDermott and product development chief Jim Hagemann Snabe co-CEOs.

Both are already members of the company's executive board.

Apotheker became SAP's sole CEO last May after sharing the job with Henning Kagermann since April of 2008.

SAP has also put its CTO Vishal Sikka on the board and said that SAP co-founder and supervisory board chairman Hasso Plattner would ride herd over technology and product development - or at least the people running technology and product development - presumably an indication of where the board of supervisors thinks Apotheker, a sales guy, screwed up.

The company badly flubbed its SaaS Business ByDesign offering, which was supposed to solve a lot of its problems.

The company's earnings were down 12% in the fourth quarter on revenues down 9%. Revenues for the year were down 8%; software licenses nosedived 28%. And for the first time in its history SAP laid off 3,000 people last year.

Increasingly unpopular inside and out, Apotheker tried to jack up support revenues in the middle of a recession but customers rebelled at the plan and SAP was forced to offer lower-priced support.

A lot of people think SAP's problems are structural. A lot of people also think it needs new blood or even a buyer.

Ahead of a press conference Monday morning, Plattner said Sunday, "The new setup of the SAP executive board will allow SAP to better align product innovation with customer needs. The new leadership team will continue to drive forward SAP's strategy and focus on profitable growth, and will deliver its innovations in 2010 to expand SAP's leadership of the business software market."

SAP's distress will make Oracle's day.