John ‘JG’ Chirapurath Explains Why He Left Microsoft to Join SAP

Written by Jeffrey Schwartz
November 30, 2021

Chirapurath also shares how partners can benefit from the latest enhancements to SAP’s Business Technology Platform.

When Julia White left Microsoft as corporate VP for Azure, server and developer tools marketing in January to become CMO and an executive board member at SAP, Microsoft tapped John “JG” Chirapurath to fill her role.

Chirapurath was a logical choice, given he led one of the group’s fastest growing businesses: Azure Data and AI. But six months later, Chirapurath followed White to SAP, which recruited him to become chief marketing and solutions officer for its Business Technology Platform (BTP).

At this month’s SAP TechEd conference, held as a virtual event, Chirapurath made his first major appearance in his new role. SAP holds TechEd events each year, to outline new products and technology in the pipeline. During this year’s event, SAP expanded the free tier of BTP to include support for the SAP HANA Cloud and SAP Integration Suite. The company also opened the free tier to individual developers.

In an interview with Channel Futures, Chirapurath explained his decision to leave Microsoft to join SAP and he explained the behind BTP’s free tier. Here’s an excerpt of that interview, edited slightly for clarity.

Channel Futures: Having just been promoted into Julia White’s role leading all Azure marketing, what compelled you to leave Microsoft for SAP?

SAP’s JG Chirapurath

John “JG” Chirapurath: SAP is the middle of a fantastic transformation. The way you have to transform is with cloud, and cloud growth is really coming from the application end. And that’s what SAP does. It literally is the world’s largest business software company. And I just thought that the opportunity to really participate and continue my love for the space was at SAP.

CF: Can you elaborate on the opportunity you see at SAP?

JC: If you think about the app stack and apps in general, the world’s largest companies maintain their system of record in SAP applications. Whether it’s an ERP system, an HR system like SuccessFactors, spend management, things like customer experience, all of that is held in an SAP system. And to help move these customers along on their digital transformation journeys, you need these applications to work in conjunction with a platform that can help them do interesting things.

CF: What is the focus your role at SAP?

JC: I’m responsible for our business technology platform, as we call it, “BTP.” And BTP effectively underlies our line of business applications. It provides things like runtimes, ways for applications to integrate with each other, integrate processes and it provides the ability to extend through things like low-code or no-code development tools, or pro-code code-first development tools to extend these applications and the processes contained within them. And then finally, it’s a place where you can essentially collect data, where we have the SAP HANA Cloud, SAP Data Warehouse Cloud, SAP Analytics Cloud, so effectively. Customers can basically unlock outcomes on all their data.

CF: As you know, CEO Christian Klein announced last year that SAP plans to accelerate customer and partner migrations to the cloud. And, based on the TechEd announcements, it appears SAP is making strides in delivering on that. Is that a fair assessment?

JC: If you watched the TechEd keynote (below), I could put it into three key buckets. The first is there’s a ton of developer goodness. What [CTO] Juergen [Mueller] talked about, is really an expanded view of how we think about low-code, no-code, and how it stands in partnership with our tools around code-first, which we’ve always had. We’ve added a set of low code, no code development environments to stand in battle that.