Leadership change at SAP Ariba EMEA

The big news in the sector so far this year is that Paul Devlin, EMEA General Manager of SAP Ariba left the business just before Easter. Devlin was a highly respected leader with a strong sales background and great passion for working closely with his customers. He was a key part of the growth of Ariba in Europe since the SAP acquisition and will be a significant loss to the business.

His move to Edenhouse keeps him firmly in the SAP Ecosystem and it will be interesting to see if they enter the Ariba market under his influence to supplement their strengths in SAP and specifically Success Factors.

However, the business has moved to restructure the sales function under new global leader Pat McCarthy who is highly regarded, particularly in the US. McCarthy reports into the President Barry Padgett who took over after Alex Atberger’s move to SAP Hybris at the end of 2017.

The excellent commercial team assembled by Devlin is part of his legacy to the business, and in former Emptoris stalwart Justin Sadler-Smith, the business has a very experienced leader in the UK. His background will make him the ideal person to leverage the huge potential of their partnership with IBM on cognitive procurement.

Justin’s boss Dean Pathak continues to lead Northern Europe with Patrick Hyati leading the southern half of the continent. Both have impressive teams including a newly appointed Sales Director in France.

In terms of consulting, implementation and customer success, there has been some senior level restructuring rewarding a number of high performers with bigger roles.

In summary, SAP Ariba looks as well set to attract and retain both enterprise and midmarket customers as ever despite the departure of Devlin.

Shares rise as Coupa hits profitability

There’s also a positive outlook at Coupa where they have reported a first quarterly profit and a healthy share price which is bucking trends in US markets weighed down by a potential trade war.

Diginomica reported that “Coupa announced a strong end to their fiscal 2018 as the spend management firm turned in its first non-GAAP quarterly profit of $884,000, on revenues up 41% year-on-year to $53.8 million. Subscription revenues were 46.6 million, up38% year-over-year and comprised 87% of total revenue.”

CEO Rob Bernshteyn commented: “From a financial perspective, just three short years ago, over 75% of our new subscription revenues came from our core procurement applications. But today, that figure is less than 50%, with more and more coming from expense management, invoice management, supplier information management, and a host of other key offerings.”

Coupa lost an established, well respected European leader in Alex Kleiner last year. Their European Marketing Director Carina Hoogeveen also left, following Alex to Apptus. Both have since left Apptus with Carina joining Icertis, the cloud based contract management business who have been hiring aggressively in the UK in past six months.

In our last report we covered the news that long time European GM Gerard Dahan had left Ivalua to join Determine last September. Ivalua moved to replace him with Franck Lehereux joining from JDA Software early in 2018.

Acquisitions & Mergers

There have also been significant changes in ownership in the sector, most notably Jaggaer’s acquisition of BravoSolution and what was effectively a reverse takeover of Perfect Commerce by Proactis.

It’s still relatively early days for both newly formed organisations. There were a number of departures at BravoSolution in the US shortly after the deal was announced but the European businesses are largely untouched so far in terms of headcount. Given Jaggaer’s relatively small presence in Europe prior to the deal, this seems sensible.

It will be interesting to observe if there is any further restructuring, redundancies or senior hires, and of course how they intend to align the various technology offerings now available in both
newly merged companies.

More recently Advanced Solutions acquired Science Warehouse for £16m as part of their ambitions to grow its portfolio of cloud based solutions. Science Warehouse has an established client base which is at its strongest in the UK public sector including the NHS and various Universities.

This article was originally published as part of our Spring 2018 Procurement and Spend Management Insider Report. To read the full report click here.