SAP appoints Angela Colantuono as new ANZ leader
SAP has appointed Angela Colantuono as its new head of A/NZ amid a flurry of senior handovers.
As a number of the world’s leading consulting firms step up their SAP partnerships in the unfolding AI era, global enterprise resource planning (ERP) giant is itself undergoing a major international leadership overhaul in its efforts to capitalise on the rapidly emerging technology, including via the appointment of Angela Colantuono as its new president and managing director for Australia and New Zealand.
Colantuono, who crossed to SAP as its SuccessFactors public sector lead in 2017 after a decade and a half at Oracle, is based out of Melbourne.
“I’m incredibly excited to be appointed as managing director of Australia and New Zealand,” Colantuono said, thanking former A/NZ boss Damien Bueno who after nearly six years moves into a new role focused on SAP’s global cloud transformation strategy. “I look forward to working with our customers to help build operational resilience, leveraging SAP capabilities to automate their processes, enhance the user experiences, and improve decision-making.”
With the firm to report its 2023 financials later this month, SAP’s cloud business in the previous period grew by 40 percent to now account for close to half of the company’s $30 billion-plus in global annual revenues, with Asia Pacific & Japan president Paul Marriott stating; “A/NZ is a key market unit for the region as one of the fastest-growing globally, and I’m confident Angela’s uncompromising focus on driving customer value will support the next phase of growth.”
SAP’s tandem with consultants
In addition to the scramble in recent years among the local branches of big consultancies to boost their SAP capabilities – including Accenture’s on-boarding of Melbourne-headquartered advisory Bourne Digital and KPMG’s acquisition of Think180 in Adelaide in the past twelve months (along with the A/NZ team added through Wipro’s $540 million 2022 purchase of Rizing) – the world’s biggest digital consulting players have also been busy extending their partnerships with the software firm.
As just a tiny sample, Bain & Company deepened its relationship with SAP mid-year on a joint strategic consulting and implementation offering, while only last week IBM Consulting and SAP announced a collaboration to develop AI solutions for the consumer goods and retail sectors. Notably, Deloitte’s former global chief Punit Renjen is set to take over as SAP chair, with the Big Four firm consistently recognised as one of SAP’s leading partners in Australia.
Meanwhile, a new ANZSAP magazine has recently launched, and while perhaps not to everyone’s reading tastes, the inaugural edition includes a top ten of the region’s most influential SAP experts and leaders. Among those featured were Bourne Digital CTO Phil Cooley, Lemongrass Consulting APAC Executive VP Jason Nicholl, and DXC Technology senior solutions architect Andrei Vishnevsky, and Jackie Elias, director of The Project Consultants.
