SAP America president resigns

The German software giant says the president of its SAP America subsidiary, Jeremy Coote, has resigned to take a job at front-office software vendor Siebel Systems.

Kim Girard

Kim Girard has written about business and technology for more than a decade, as an editor at CNET News.com, senior writer at Business 2.0 magazine and online writer at Red Herring. As a freelancer, she's written for publications including Fast Company, CIO and Berkeley's Haas School of Business. She also assisted Business Week's Peter Burrows with his 2003 book Backfire, which covered the travails of controversial Hewlett-Packard CEO Carly Fiorina. An avid cook, she's blogged about the joy of cheap wine and thinks about food most days in ways some find obsessive.

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Kim Girard

Jan. 2, 2002 4:43 p.m. PT

2 min read

German software giant SAP today said the president of its SAP America subsidiary, Jeremy Coote, has resigned to take a job at front-office software vendor Siebel Systems.

The news comes just months after Paul Wahl, former CEO of SAP America, left the firm to join a security start-up in Silicon Valley. Wahl was replaced by Kevin McKay.

At Siebel, Coote will take over as the vice president of North American operations.

Coote, a longtime SAP employee, started in the Switzerland office of SAP in 1988. In his decade at SAP, Coote served as chief financial officer of SAP America, then was promoted to executive vice president, and then president of SAP America in 1996.

McKay said he enjoyed working with Coote, describing him as a charismatic leader.

"He really didn't tell me why he left," other than that he got a "compelling offer," said McKay, who joined SAP as chief financial officer of SAP America four years ago.

Coote's departure is bad timing for SAP, which plans to release customer relationship management (CRM) software this spring that competes with front-office leader Siebel's established line of CRM applications.

Luring Coote to Siebel was likely a calculated move on Siebel's part, said John Bermudez, a vice president at Boston-based AMR Research.

"[Coote] can create lots of fear, uncertainty, and doubt about what SAP has and why Siebel is better," he said.

Coote's departure comes as SAP today also announced it has formed six industry sectors in its Americas region--and appointed six managers to run the new sectors--to further penetrate new and existing markets.

With the move, the company is aligning its sales and marketing teams around vertical markets instead of geographic regions to better compliment the way their customers are now doing business. Analysts said the realignment is becoming more common throughout the ERP software and IT services industry.

McKay said he suspects SAP America's shift toward a flatter organization, which was completed in January, contributed to Coote's departure, along with the fact that Coote had been with the company for a decade and probably wanted a change.

Now, six SAP America managers will report to McKay, who will also serve as president. "This is sort of a natural evolution of our structure," McKay said. SAP spent the past two years planning how to change management of business in America, Canada, and Latin America.

SAP America, with 5,800 employees, is responsible for between 43 and 47 percent of the firm's worldwide revenue.