CFO Studio magazine with Todd McElhatton

4 cfostudio.com COVER STORY TODD M c ELHATTON SUNNY Outlook is - BY JULIE BARKER - THE CHIEF FINANCIAL OFFICER OF SAP’S CLOUD BUSINESS OVERSEES THE GLOBAL COMPANY’S FASTEST-GROWING SEGMENT I n the world of enterprise application software, SAP is a giant even amidst a towering $419 billion market. The German-based company has 437,000 customers in 180 countries, including 92 percent of the Forbes Global 2000 companies. Some 70 percent of the world’s transaction revenue touches one of the company’s systems. But even with a market-share advantage, the organization’s leaders know it can’t stand pat—and that’s part of the reason SAP is transitioning those clients from on- premise software to the cloud. Of course, such a maneuver means that SAP’s strategic thinking and internal processes must also change. Radically. The CFO who is helping SAP make that transition is Todd McElhatton, an energetic, down-to-earth executive whose mission has been to steadily and nimbly steer the Cloud Business Group even as SAP has continually transformed its business to ready itself for the next wave of growth and disruption. He joined SAP in February 2017 as CFO for North America and was promoted into the Cloud role in June 2018. He’d had extensive experience before that, much of it with Hewlett-Packard, but also with cloud technology providers Oracle and VMWare. SAP has individual CFOs for its regions and largest lines of businesses, but McElhatton alone has end-to-end P&L responsibility in his Cloud Business Group role. He’s the decision maker on pricing strategies and on deploying resources to accelerate the company’s growth trajectory. “It’s really like running your own company,” he says. “This year SAP’s cloud business will be somewhere between 6.7 and 7 billion euros [US $7.5 to $7.8 billion] based on the most recent guidance that we’ve shared Photography: Amy Mikler

RkJQdWJsaXNoZXIy ODg2OTA=