Former SAP CEO Léo Apotheker joins cloud SCM vendor

Former SAP CEO Léo Apotheker has been appointed to the board of GT Nexus, maker of on-demand SCM (supply chain management) software, two months after his departure from the ERP (enterprise resource planning) giant.

Apotheker, who has been replaced by co-CEOs Jim Hagemann Snabe and Bill McDermott, had a short and rocky tenure in the top slot at SAP due to flagging sales and user discontent over a support price increase. He was appointed co-CEO in May 2008 and became sole CEO last year after Henning Kagermann's retirement.

SAP has been taking a somewhat guarded approach to cloud computing, embarking on a strategy that will see the vendor release SaaS (software as a service) extensions to its on-premises ERP systems.

But Apotheker fully embraced the cloud-computing model in a prepared statement, saying "the next wave in business software is going to be network platforms like GT Nexus."

The Oakland, California, company counts more than 40,000 users of its software across some 15,000 organisations, according to the announcement.