While SAP, Oracle, and Workday typically try to scratch each other’s eyes out in the fiercely competitive enterprise apps/agents marketplace, they’ve all recently taken very similar steps to combine and/or flatten their sales organizations to make life easier for their customers.
The timing for this exceptionally rare full-alignment phenomenon is excellent because customers are facing unprecedented levels of pressure to:
- become AI leaders, but don’t spend too much on AI;
- use AI to develop new business models, but don’t take unnecessary risks;
- jump all over this new Agentic AI thing, but don’t disrupt their use of apps; and
- buff and polish their data estates into pristine condition while not spending too much and don’t take any risks and do it incredibly rapidly.
Given that environment, maybe this Great Alignment didn’t just bubble up spontaneously and instead was a simultaneous and uncensored reaction from business leaders along the lines of “Either stop making it so difficult for me to do business with you or you will never get another nickel from my company!”
Now, while I’m a big believer in self-improvement and the ascendant nature of human beings, I’m gonna bet that the trigger behind these significant sales-org moves by the apps/agents vendors was that unvarnished threat.
However it all came about, here’s what SAP, Oracle, and Workday are doing to make it easier for customers to:
- do business with them (fewer salespeople from the same vendor calling on the same account but with different stories);
- have a seamless experience across sales, support, and service;
- get real-time decisions rather than “I’ll have to check with corporate on that”; and
- spend less time haggling with software vendors and more time accelerating their own operations and dazzling their own customers.
SAP
Uniting its sales team with its customer support team, SAP has put both organizations under the leadership of long-time executive board member Thomas Saueressig, who takes on the new title of chief customer officer. Here is part of SAP’s rationale for the move:
“The new Board area is designed to strengthen SAP’s customer-centric operating model by delivering seamless, end-to-end experience from initial engagement through long-term value realization…. [Saueressig]will oversee the full customer journey, aligning selling, delivery, services and support driving adoption, renewal and expansion of SAP’s cloud and AI-powered solutions.”
For several years, SAP has referred to its sales organization as “Customer Success,” and in that context it makes perfect sense for that team to be seamlessly linked with the Customer Services and Delivery team that SAP created and Saueressig has led for the past few years. SAP said its two chief revenue officers, Jan Gilg and Manos Raptopoulos, will report to Saueressig.
SAP CEO Christian Klein perfectly captured the strategic intent of the reorganization in this comment from the SAP press release:
“In a business where adoption and renewal define success, the lines between selling and delivering disappear. Bringing Customer Success and Customer Services & Delivery together is the right move now for our customers and for SAP, as we go all in on AI. Thomas combines deep product expertise with strong experience in services and customer delivery, and he has earned the trust of our customers and teams.”
ORACLE
Late last year, when Oracle announced that longtime CEO Safra Catz had decided to move to the new role of executive vice-chairman so that presidents Clay Magouyrk and Mike Sicilia could both be promoted to CEO roles, Oracle promoted sales executive Mark Hura to the new position of president of global field operations. The new role gave Hura responsibility for not only the infrastructure and database business he’d led for several years but also Oracle’s applications business, but its horizontal Fusion applications and agents and also its Industries apps and agents.
When that move was announced, newly named CEO Sicilia described how the creation of the new role for Hura was triggered by the new to engage with customers in new and better ways because of the changing nature of their companies and also the expanded contributions Oracle’s services and technologies could offer. Here’s an excerpt from Oracle’s fiscal-Q2 earnings call in September:
“We at Oracle are the custodian and the partner to our customers for that mission-critical data–be it backoffice data, be it healthcare EHR data, be it retail-merchandising data–and I think that puts us in a very unique position in that market. It also puts us in a very unique position to deliver end-to-end industry cloud suites.
“And we’re not just thinking about this from a product standpoint, but also with how we engage with our customers. And that’s one of the reasons you heard about Mark being promoted. We’re streamlining our go-to-market as well to make sure that we’re positioning these end-to-end suites, which are unmatched in the industry.
“There’s no other company in the world that has the OCI business, the horizontal applications business, the industries business, the analytics on top of it, the inferencing business, retrieval-augmented generation, all in one package. And we need to make sure that when we’re talking with our customers, we’re engaged at the highest level. So we’ve made changes not just at our product level, but also with how we engage with our customers. “The other thing I think is becoming apparent to us is that it’s not just about selling and delivering this to enterprises. It’s actually about opening up new ecosystems.”
On that final point, Sicilia said the reorganized sales team would be able to help customers using AI to create cross-industry relationships that he said would become “new ecosystems” involving not only companies collaborating in the same vertical market but indeed entire industries.
And traditional sales organizations that are stratified by product categories could never be able to help customers pursue these new type of opportunities with emerging ecosystems, Sicilia said.
WORKDAY
On the company’s recent fiscal-Q4 earnings call, president and chief commercial officer Rob Enslin described how the company decided to eliminate a very high-level executive — the chief revenue officer — and related roles in order to flatten the sales organization and enable faster and tighter communication and engagements with customers.
Asked about the departure of the CRO, Enslin said, “It’s pretty simple: the regional leaders–who we have real confidence in and have been doing a really good job over the last couple of years, especially bringing on new solutions and products and driving their business–they’ll report directly into me.
“In the AI Revolution, it’s all about speed of decision-making and urgency. It allows us to move faster and it puts a lot of the decision-making right at the customer where we want it. Tying into that, it also allows us to build activation engines for where we’re going with forward-deployment engineers to drive consumption faster, and we want to get that out into the market with incredible amount of speed.”
Enslin’s plan was heartily seconded by Workday cofounder and once-again CEO Aneel Bhusri because of the better outcomes it can create for customers.
“I would just say that I’m excited that Rob has flattened the organization,” Bhusri said, “because in this world, flatter organizations move faster. And I’m excited about where the sales organization is headed.”
Final Thought
I love to see these similar but unique examples of how Cloud Wars Top 10 companies are remaking themselves and their go-to-market organizations to help drive better customer outcomes in these crazy days of the AI Revolution.
I also suspect that while these moves all indicators of great progress, there’s more to be done —and we’re sure to see even bigger and wider-ranging moves in 2026 as the AI Revolution spins up the AI Economy.
