CDN has learned through a reliable source that Catherine Perry-Robertson, SAP Canada’s national vice-president of ecosystems and channels, will be leaving this role.
SAP Canada channel chief Mary Peterson will be leading the Canadian general business and channel team on an interim basis. The position of national vice-president of ecosystems and channels has been dropped by the subsidiary. Perry-Robertson remains with the company.
Peterson will now report directly to SAP Canada president Bob Elliott. An SAP Canada spokesperson confirmed the change in channel leadership and stated that channel partners continue to be a key ingredient to SAP’s growth plans in Canada.
Perry-Robertson was put in this newly created role at SAP Canada at the beginning of September of last year. While in this role, Perry-Robertson developed a tight collaboration with the channel team and the direct sales unit.
She told CDN at the time, that in a typical organization the channel and the direct sales team are separate. What was unique to SAP Canada with this approach is they were going to bring the power of the two organizations together.
“It’s not going to be an us versus them situation. We are going to use them as a collective team to cover the entire market,” Perry-Robertson said.
Perry-Robertson also developed SAP’s Managed Cloud-as-a-Service offering for the marketplace.
Perry-Robertson previously helped to build J.D. Edwards’ channel business along with working in executive roles at Bell and Nortel. She also co-founded the Business Women’s Network at SAP and became a board member of the Canadian Channel Chiefs Council.
This move in the channel occurs during a time when SAP announced new versions of its SAP Transportation Management and Extended Warehouse Management applications, along with a renewed emphasis on cloud computing. The company also forged an alliance partnership with VMware that will see the the SAP HANA platform on VMware vSphere 5.5.
SAP acquires marketing firm
SAP has acquired SeeWhy, a real-time behavioral marketing company for its Hybris commerce platform.
SeeWhy uses the cloud to target marketing solutions for businesses to help increase customer engagement and drive revenues.
Terms of the deal were not disclosed, but SAP said the growth of online and omni-channel commerce requires businesses across industries to transition to automated personalized marketing and experiences. Businesses are focusing on solutions that convert more traffic into purchases, and nurture customers across channels and devices, while marketers are shifting from one-size-fits-all marketing.
Over the years SeeWhy’s products recovering more than US$500 million annually in lost sales for many of the world’s leading companies.