by twieberneit | Jul 24, 2024 | Analysis, Blog |
The news On Monday, July 22, 2024, SAP presented its numbers for Q2 and H1, 2024. The highlights include: Cloud backlog up by 28% (27% in Q1) Total revenue up 10% (8% in Q1) Cloud and software revenue up 10% (9% in Q1) Cloud revenue up 25% (24% in Q1) Cloud ERP suite revenue up 33% (31% in Q1) This in combination with an increasing margin. The total revenue growth and high profitability needs to be seen in the context of the company’s still ongoing cloud transformation, with continuously decreasing software license and support revenues. Obviously, the financial community liked these numbers, as can be seen by the jump of SAP’s share price by more than 5 per cent from about $200 to $212 after releasing the earnings numbers. According to CEO Christian Klein, a lot of this success can be attributed to SAP’s AI strategy. Klein stated that almost a fifth of all closed deals included premium AI use cases. A grain of salt in the soup is the employee engagement index that is part of the non-financial outlook. SAP reduced the 2024 target from 76 – 80 per cent in Q1 to 70 – 74 per cent. The bigger picture To put this in perspective with cloud juggernaut Salesforce, the total revenue growth is comparable with the Salesforce Q1, 2025 statement. Salesforce’s revenue grew by 11 per cent and the current performance obligation by 10 per cent. Also, in contrast to Salesforce, SAP reiterated and strengthened its outlook instead of painting a more muted picture. The main competition in the next months and years will happen in...
by twieberneit | Nov 10, 2023 | Analysis, Blog |
The News A lot is going on in the SAPverse during October and the early days of November 2023. First, SAP conducted its CXLive event with CX-related announcements, then the company reported good Q3/2023 figures, a new version of its CX software that includes new generative AI capabilities got released and lastly, it executed its SAP TechEd event with a good number of AI-, BTP-, and ERP related announcements. As this is quite a lot, I covered the CX world in a previous post and will cover the TechEd related news in this post. So, what is new at SAP TechEd? For one, it is enough to fill a 17-page pre-event news guide that SAP sent out. SAP certainly is able to stack up the news for major events. I took the liberty to ask ChatGPT for a summary of the document, which I slightly edited afterwards. Here we are: AI and Development Environments: SAP introduces SAP Build Code with generative AI, improving application development and testing, while new AI capabilities are integrated across SAP’s ecosystem to drive automation. Business Technology Platform (BTP): BTP is augmented with new guides for application deployment and makes the SAP Cloud SDK for Java open source. A new vector capability for managing unstructured data via high-dimensional vectors is announced as part of SAP HANA, enhancing developer productivity, and allowing for Retrieval Augmented Generation (RAG) that combines large language models with business data. SAP Graph is generally available, and now extends API management to offer a unified API for streamlined access to enterprise data, boosting productivity and integration efforts. Cloud ERP: SAP introduces new...
