SAP Americas To Reorganize, Cut 300 JobsSAP Americas To Reorganize, Cut 300 Jobs

SAP Americas, the North American arm of German software company SAP, will lay off 300 personnel, about 7% of its U.S. workforce, before the end of the year as the result of the troubled U.S. economy and a new company strategy for sales and support of SAP products.

An SAP spokesman says all SAP and mySAP.com products will continue to be offered, and the layoffs will not affect support for existing SAP customers. The reorganization involves changing SAP America's sales and support focus from support of 21 individual industry verticals to supporting 12 "industry clusters."

For example, SAP's aerospace and defense sales and support organization has been separate from its engineering and construction organization. Those organizations will be consolidated into the aerospace and defense, engineering and construction industry cluster, the spokesman says. Once the reorganization is complete, the positions being cut would be "redundant," the spokesman says.

The reorganization also will let SAP focus more sharply on core product offerings like customer-relationship management, supply-chain management, and enterprise resource planning software, according to the spokesman. SAP Americas has about 4,200 employees.