Channel Exec Troy Leaving SAP

CRN

Troy, executive vice president of SAP's global indirect channels business for small and midsize enterprises (SME), will be leaving the company soon, an SAP spokeswoman confirmed. Some of Troy's duties will fall to Terrance Scerri, senior vice president of global small-business sales.

Troy "laid the foundations for what SAP is doing in the channels, and we owe her," the spokeswoman said, adding that Troy is leaving for personal reasons.

SAP tapped Troy, an industry veteran with channel expertise, to spearhead its partner push into smaller companies in July 2004. She is based in Paris. She's still with the company, and it's unclear when her departure date will be. "This is all happening now," the spokeswoman said.

Scerri, who has worked for Compaq and Hewlett-Packard, has years of channel experience, according to SAP.

SAP watchers said Troy was instrumental in driving the enterprise software giant's small- and midsize-business strategy and helping the company build a presence among VARs and integrators needed to penetrate these smaller businesses. A big part of that was SAP's PartnerEdge program .

Before joining SAP, Troy was executive vice president of worldwide channels at Network Associates; CEO of PartnerWare, a maker of partner management software; and vice president of worldwide channels at Tivoli Systems. Before that, she spent more than 10 years at IBM.

However, SAP has loaded up onchannel executives, bringing aboard Michael Sotnick from Veritas Software as senior vice president of small- and midsize-enterprise business for SAP Americas and Ira Simon from CA as vice president of channel marketing for SAP Global SMB. This could be a case of too many layers, some industry observers said.

One Chicago-based SAP partner said this movement at the top should have little bearing on most partners' business. "I don't deal with Donna [Troy]," he noted, adding that SAP has done a good job building a channel business out of its direct-sales roots.

SAP's fourth-quarter sales fell short of expectations. The company is battling Oracle for its bread-and-butter enterprise applications business. SAP and Oracle are fighting to bring their wares downmarket to SMBs, where they must contend with Sage Software and Microsoft.

In other news, SAP execs on the earnings call, said the company plans a set of hosted ERP and CRM applications for the mid market. CRN first reported on this plan last May.

This story was updated Friday evening with information from the company's earnings call