Financial Officer Luka Mucic described the restructuring as a “fitness program” for Europe’s most valuable technology firm. We guess the sort of fitness he means is its expense of programmers having to lift all their personal belongings out of the building.

Many observers are surprised that SAPs top software talent would be among those leaving the building with their personal belongings and an old photocopy paper box.

Bjoern Goerke, chief technology officer and head of SAP’s cloud platform business, along with programming gurus Thomas Jung and Rich Heilman are exiting stage left, pursued by a bear.

The departures underscore CEO Bill McDermott’s determination to deliver on his long-stated ambition to drag SAP out of its comfort zone providing old-school enterprise software and complete its transformation into a digital platform business.

All this risks hacking off SAPs existing customer base who have spent fortunes on its “old style” software.

Marco Lenck, chairman of the German-speaking SAP User Group (DSAG) which represents 3,500 companies warned SAP it needed to support its existing business.

“We are seeing that a lot of people with know-how are leaving the company. That’s a trend that should not become too extensive.”

Its newer cloud operation is smaller and is growing quickly but, because it is subscription based, has thinner margins.

McDermotthas  promised to treble the size of the cloud business by 2023, bringing total revenues at SAP to 35 billion euro ($40 billion), as it competes with the likes of Oracle and Salesforce.com.