Pete Tantillo recalls being somewhat surprised when he discovered that his career path could be leading to the CFO office. “I’m sort of an accidental CFO,” explains Tantillo, who first arrived inside the finance function in the mid-1990s, when his employer tasked him with making a promising new ERP application meet the needs of finance.

The successful implementation led to a job offer from then little-known SAP–which was busy launching the next great technology wave, known as the client server. Tantillo loved the work (he stayed at SAP for 13 years) and eventually ran SAP’s services–the role that would ultimately become his career game changer.

Having helped to grow a profitable services business alongside SAP’s software juggernaut, Tantillo was hired away from SAP by a former mentor who believed that Tantillo’s services smarts could help her to turn around a struggling software unit.

However, Tantillo’s responsibilities went well beyond services, as he became tasked with organizing, monetizing, and supporting the company’s finance and business operations. This would the first in a number of CFO tours of duty that from a career experience point of view would appear to have been anything but accidental. —Jack Sweeney