SaaS Heavy-hitter Leaves SAP for Salesforce.com

July 11, 2008
miproconsulting
News

Enterprise software giant SAP has lost one of its brightest software-as-a-service stars to SaaS titan Salesforce.com, I can exclusively reveal. Steve Lucas, who spearheaded the development of SaaS at Business Objects, acquired by SAP last year, left the company at the end of June and began work straight away at Salesforce.com, where his job title is (bear with me, it’s quite long): senior vice-president of platform marketing, AppExchange and Force.com.

Salesforce.com arguably has the most impressive collective vision of where SaaS will go from here. This is particularly validated by all-star pickups like this one, as well as Erin TenWolde, who also recently started at SFDC.

It will be interesting to see how SAP adjusts its SaaS roadmap in the wake of Lucas’s leaving. If this is true:

Lucas is proud of what has been achieved at Business Objects, but he said that SAP’s ability to make broader progress with SaaS is stymied by the lack of a central vision for the model. “SAP doesn’t have a SaaS strategy,” he told me. “They don’t have a single piece of paper that states what their SaaS strategy is.”

…then SAP might be rudderless in terms of SaaS for quite some time.