SAP eliminated its dual-leadership structure with long-time executive and short-time co-CEO Jennifer Morgan set to leave the company on April 30. The move will remove the “co” from Christian Klein’s previous title, leaving him as SAP’s lone leader.

In a statement, SAP cited the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic as playing a role in the executive change.

“More than ever, the current environment requires companies to take swift, determined action which is best supported by a very clear leadership structure,” a company statement read. “Therefore, the decision to transfer from co-CEO to sole CEO model was taken earlier than planned to ensure strong, unambiguous steering in times of an unprecedented crisis.”

All parties involved, including SAP Board Chairman Hasso Plattner, provided positive comments about the move. Morgan’s were perhaps the most telling, as she noted that “with unprecedented change within the world, it has become clear that now is the right time for the company to transition to a single CEO leading the business.”

Morgan and Klein were named to the co-CEO position last October, when SAP’s previous CEO Bill McDermott abruptly resigned. In announcing the new two-headed leadership team, Plattner said the move was done through the company’s “long-term succession plan.”

“Bill and I made the decision over a year ago to expand Jennifer and Christian’s roles as part of a long-term process to develop them as our next generation of leaders,” Plattner wrote. “We are confident in their vision and capabilities as we take SAP to its next phase of growth and innovation.”

That focus has been on SAP’s cloud business, which was the background for both Morgan and Klein.

Morgan joined SAP in 2004, and most recently served as president of the company’s Cloud Business Group. This included its Qualtrics, SuccessFactors, Ariba, Fieldglass, Customer Experience, and Concur businesses. She had early last year replaced Robert Enslin as head of SAP’s Cloud Business Group. Enslin, who was a long-time executive at SAP, was quickly snapped up by Google, who named him president of global customer operations for its Google Cloud business.

(After leaving SAP, McDermott quickly re-appeared at ServiceNow as its CEO. Keep that company name in mind when charting Morgan's future.)

Klein has been with SAP for 20 years, and most recently served as its COO, where he oversaw the company’s flagship S/4HANA product.

Andrew Bartels, VP and principal analyst at Forrester Research, said that Klein's ascension does align with SAP's notion of wanting to clear up its leadership structure in light of the current economic reality.

"Obviously the co-CEOs structure is clearly not a common practice, and only works in fairly stable environments where you're trying to balance two sets of competing forces and you want these guys to wrestle it out," Bartels said. "But then in a case like this where you need decisive action, then it makes a lot of sense to have one person who's making decisions quickly and not having to go spend half an hour talking with so and so to get aligned on a decision. It just slows you down."

He also noted that Klein's background at SAP on operations is more aligned with where SAP sees its greatest need in the near term. "Christian has been stronger on the core development and operations at SAP," Bartels said.

However, Bartels also said the move could align with the heritage of SAP's CEO structure.

"SAP is a very German company and Jennifer's not German. And SAP is a very male company," Bartels said. "Maybe Jennifer said that 'I can read these tea leaves and I am not going to battle this out. I know SAP is not an environment that is going to welcome a non-German, non-male CEO.' ... So I think it was a combination of those factors that led to this end."

The leadership change also comes two months after SAP revamped its organizational structure, which included the exit of two board members. The company said the revamp provided a more integrated face for its customers.

And perhaps highlighting its new long-term succession plan, SAP earlier this month extended the contract of its current CFO Luka Mucic for five years, which now runs through March 2026.

Alongside the CEO structure change, SAP also released full first-quarter financial results there were in line with a pre-announcement that the company released earlier this month.

Klein, in a statement, also echoed what other vendors have been reporting in terms of the positive beginning of the quarter. “Building on last year’s momentum, SAP started the first two months of the quarter with strong momentum and healthy growth,” he noted, with a company statement adding “as the impact of the COVID-19 crisis rapidly intensified toward the end of the quarter, a significant amount of new business was postponed.”

That postponement was pointedly seen in its software license business, which posted a 31% drop in revenues compared with the first quarter of last year. However, the company’s larger cloud operations managed a 29% increase in revenues, which boosted its cloud and software revenue combination to a 7% gain.

IBM, which also reported Q1 results this week, explained that it also witnessed early momentum that was dashed in March due to the COVID-19 pandemic.

Looking ahead, SAP lowered its revenues expectations by nearly 5% and operating profits by 8%. The company said that update “assumes the current COVID-19 induced challenging demand environment deteriorates through the second quarter before gradually improving in the third and fourth quarter as economies reopen and population lockdowns end.”