by twieberneit | Jan 25, 2025 | Blog |
Cloud Wars’ Bob Evans recently did an excellent and very interesting interview with SAP CEO Christian Klein about SAP’s priorities, which include integrating generative AI with SAP Business AI “to address complex business challenges an drive holistic transformation by optimizing processes like quote to cash”. Klein repeatedly referred to end-to-end (E2E) and SAP’s great library of E2E processes that gives the essence of or at least a standardized framework for the value streams within a business. Not surprisingly, and correctly so, Klein also repeatedly emphasized the value of AI and, in particular, generative AI, to create customer value. This happens via Joule’s ability to orchestrate different agents across the value chain, i.e., different E2E processes. Joule is SAP’s Ai assistant. He also emphasized on the value of the suite and on the importance to “in the core business” not run with “agents of 100s of different tech companies”. This is where “the suite is winning”. Evans writes that SAP had “significant growth in applications, outpacing competitors. Klein attributes this to SAP’s suite approach, which provides a comprehensive solution for core business processes. He talks about the importance of integration and extensibility, allowing customers to choose the best solutions for their needs.” This is technically a correct statement. I am fairly sure that SAP will report another outstanding year on January 28, 2025. In the first three quarters of FY 2024 SAP certainly outpaced the cloud business applications competition, including Salesforce. However, there is a caveat to it. This growth is largely attributable to S/4HANA cloud. Don’t get me wrong, doing this is no mean feat. SAP profitably grows while...
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 | Jun 6, 2024 | Analysis, Blog |
The News On June 5, 2024, SAP announced that it entered into a definitive agreement to acquire WalkMe. Walkme is a leader in the digital adoption platform (DAP) market. DAPs are about the elimination of digital friction from workflows to turn the business application tech stack into a competitive advantage. You can read the complete announcement here. WalkMe’s solutions help organizations navigate constant technology change by providing users with advanced guidance and automation features that enable them to execute workflows seamlessly across any number of applications. This results in higher adoption of the underlying application and as such drives value realization. By combining WalkMe with SAP’s earlier acquisitions Signavio and LeanIX, SAP intends to complement its business transformation management portfolio to better help customers through their transformation journeys. According to the press release, WalkMe helps organizations boost enterprise productivity and lower risk by enabling consistent, effective and efficient use of software and the workflows it enables. Its DAP works on top of an organization’s application landscape, detects where people encounter friction and provides the tailored support and automation they need to complete the job to be done, right in the flow of work, across any application. Importantly, WalkMe will continue to fully support non-SAP applications. “Applications, processes, data and people are the four key elements of a successful business transformation,” said Christian Klein, CEO and member of the Executive Board of SAP SE. “By acquiring WalkMe, we are doubling down on the support we provide our end users, helping them to quickly adopt new solutions and features to get the maximum value out of their IT investments.” The acquisition...
by twieberneit | Jan 25, 2024 | Analysis, Blog |
The News On January 23, 2024, SAP announced the results of its Q4 and fiscal year 2023, along with an update of the company’s 2025 ambition. The ambition includes a shift of focus on key strategic growth areas and a restructuring program. This program will cost around 2.2 billion dollar and affect about 8,000 employees. Notably, SAP does not look at lay-offs but a “voluntary leave program and internal re-skilling investments”. No details are known yet. One of the core investment areas going forward will be Business AI; in addition, the company will strive to capture organizational synergies, leverage AI-driven efficiencies and prepare the company for the expected growth. Looking at the numbers, SAP had a very successful year, meeting or exceeding the outlook metrics set and communicated for 2023. SAP key financial results FY 2023; source SAP According to CEO Christian Klein, the “current cloud backlog increased by 27 percent to reach an all-time high” growth. This number and the cloud revenue are particularly driven by S/4HANA growth. In addition, SAP communicated a bold outlook with a CAGR of 25 percent plus through 2025 and beyond. Wall Street was excited. The Bigger Picture AI is the new cloud, currently the biggest thing since the invention of sliced bread. The industry is at the peak of an AI hype cycle. So far, we have seen a lot of low-hanging fruit being showcased while being promised an age of AI that “changes everything”. According to the recently published results of the PWC annual global CEO surveyhttps://www.pwc.com/us/en/library/ceo-survey.html, around two thirds of CEOs believe that the use of generative AI will improve their company’s products...
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...
