SAP on Tuesday announced that José Duarte is now president and CEO of the company's Europe, Middle East and Africa (EMEA) territory, while Rodolpho Cardenuto assumes the same role at SAP's Latin America division.

The executives are respectively taking over responsibilities held by Erwin Gunst and Bill McDermott, both of whom SAP previously announced would be joining its executive board.

In addition to their executive board appointments, Gunst is now chief operating officer, SAP AG, and McDermott has become president and CEO of global field operations.

Duarte had been with SAP more than 15 years and most recently headed the Large Enterprise division in EMEA, according to a statement.

Cardenuto, meanwhile, arrives at SAP from Hewlett-Packard, where he served as director of industry sales and alliances for Latin America and the Caribbean, SAP said.

The news brought mixed reactions from industry analysts on Tuesday.

"The changes concerning sales and field operations are almost too high-level to be interesting at this point, although clearly Bill McDermott continues to consolidate his position with this global field role," Redmonk analyst James Governor via e-mail.

These recent reorganization moves represent a growing emphasis on sales within SAP, according to Forrester Research analyst Ray Wang.

At the same time, the company has a major technology integration workload to deal with, following its US$6.8 billion acquisition of BI (business intelligence) vendor Business Objects.

Changes should be coming in this regard as well, according to Wang.

"There should be another, quieter reorganization of the development teams that break apart the traditional CRM, ERP and SCM worlds as well," he wrote in an e-mail message. "Expect the new breakouts to reflect SAP's new value proposition to the market, which looks at end-to-end processes."