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Guess who SAP's picked for UK boss? Yep, it's a distie man

Former DCC ops chief looking to cloud, HANA to push sales

Distribution isn’t typically the first port of call for enterprise software vendors looking to recruit execs, but SAP has broken the mould by tapping up the chief operations man at DCC Exertis to head up its UK and Ireland biz.

Cormac Watter, COO at the tech arm of Irish conglomerate DCC — which owns Exertis (formerly trading as Micro-P and Gem among other brands) — has landed at the German software developer.

Prior to the COO position, he was head of group IT at DCC, CEO at deli-food organisation Chef Solutions, integration director at convenience food producer Greencore Group, and CIO at bakery Aryzta AG.

As is customary, Watters’ PR peeps released a statement in which he is quoted as saying how “excited” he is to be joining SAP, and about “helping” customers “capitalise” on the cloud and data analytics.

“I am eager to make use of my experience from the distribution side of the technology industry to help improve the services and solutions SAP offers its customers,” he added.

Distributors typically run lean mean operations (shaped by eroding margins) and of late more and more of these companies are building services operations to compensate for falling hardware sales and profits.

SAP has a checkered past in the channel, as best friend and then enemy. It seems to have settled on trying to pally up to partners in the small and medium-sized customer market.

Watters will manage a team of 1,400 staff and look to fire up his own people and those within resellers and integrators to take its clouds to customers.

Hopefully the newbie will hang around longer than his predecessors; former UK head Tim Noble began the first of his two stints in June 2009 until July 2011; Steve Winter took over for six months until April 2012; Fred Hessabi came in as interim; then Noble returned until May 2014.

Watters will report to Franck Cohen, president of SAP EMEA. ®

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