SAP luring top talent from Oracle and Siebel

Just a week after Oracle announced its "OFF SAP" program, SAP is getting ready to strike a counter-blow. SAP will announce this week that it has hired some top developers from Oracle, as well as some from Siebel. According to CNET,

Bill Wohl, SAP's communications chief, said late Thursday that the German software company has attracted some new talent, specifically in the area of applications development, including several "high level" people from its rivals. While Wohl declined to name the executives coming to SAP, he indicated that the software developers are from companies including Oracle, PeopleSoft and Siebel Systems, three of the software maker's closest competitors in the business software arena.

This might also explain why Siebel felt the need to put an employee retention plan in place last month.

Update, June 20. SAP has released the names of its new hires. Ouch! It doesn't look pretty for Oracle or Siebel. Here's the list:

• Richard Campione, most recently Siebel's group vice president & general manager for Siebel's financial services and public sector businesses. He is now SAP's Senior Vice President, Industry Solutions Marketing.
  


• Mike Mayer, a 10 year Oracle veteran, most recently senior director, International Projects, where he drove major projects in developing countries. He is now taking a similar position at SAP.
  


• Nimish Mehta, from Siebel Systems where as group vice president, Customer Data Integration, he led Siebel’s highest-growth division, growing revenue from virtually nothing to $70M in 18 months. Prior to Siebel, he was a 10 year Oracle veteran, where he reported directly to Larry Ellison. He's now responsible for SAP’s Enterprise Information strategy and products, including both structured and unstructured data.
  


• Doug Merritt, from Quest Software and, prior to that, VP/GM in charge of PeopleSoft's Human Capital Management (HCM) products, a $1 billion dollar product division. He's now leading SAP's efforts to lower total cost of ownership across SAP’s applications and industries and to provide better product portfolio management and product life-cycle services within SAP and to SAP customers and partners.
  


• George Paolini, from Borland and formerly Sun, where he directed a partner "ecosystem" for Sun's Java development efforts. He's now doing the same thing for SAP, driving SAP's expansion of its NetWeaver partner program.
  


• Dan Rosenberg, another 10 year Oracle veteran, where he was in charge of usability and user-interface design for all Oracle product lines, ranging from database and development tools to applications. He's now doing a similar job at SAP, in charge of the user experience for all SAP products, including application user interfaces as well as SAP NetWeaver design time and platform administration user interfaces.
  


• Gordon Simpson, from BEA Systems, where he was the defacto CTO for the WebLogic integration division. He's now overseeing SAP's Enterprise Service Architecture (ESA)/Business Process Platform (BPP).
  


• Bob Stutz, from Siebel Systems where he was responsible for 21 vertical product lines as well as base horizontal products. He's now SAP's Senior Vice President, Product and Technology Group.
  


• John Zepecki, formerly of PeopleSoft, where he was VP in charge of developing PeopleSoft's well-regarded Enterprise Performance Management product line and its Financial Management Portal solutions. He's now responsible for SAP's xApps, its composite application initiatives.

Concerning Oracle, what is striking is that two of the names are not disgruntled ex-PeopleSofters, but are key development and marketing executives from the Oracle side.

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