Welcome to the Cloud Wars Minute — your daily cloud news and commentary show. Each episode provides insights and perspectives around the “reimagination machine” that is the cloud.
In today’s Cloud Wars Minute, I break down how SAP is outperforming Oracle, Salesforce, Workday, and Microsoft in the applications race.
Highlights
00:03 — We saw some first-quarter numbers from SAP late last week, and I think it’s fascinating to see how, in the light of these very, very strong numbers from SAP, we still seem to hear about this idea that these doomsayers are saying that AI is going to destroy the enterprise apps business. That’s certainly not happening.
00:33 — The three big numbers here: cloud revenue up 27%, almost $7 billion. Within that, its Cloud ERP Suite was up 30% to $6.1 billion, and looking out at contracted business not yet recognized as revenue, it calls it current cloud backlog, up 25% to well over $25 billion.
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00:57 — That’s pretty healthy-looking business for one that is, you know, doomed to the apocalypse and Armageddon any day now, according to some of these wizards of smart who believe that AI is going to come in and just decimate the enterprise apps business.
01:52 — The only thing I can think of that gives them this idea that the whole industry is heading for Armageddon here, they must believe that companies like SAP are unprepared for or unable to participate in the AI revolution, but that notion ignores where the data really is.
02:28 — Agentic AI is the future. Agents need data to run, and who has more and better business data than SAP? So this just confounds me.
02:43 — We continue to see SAP outperform Oracle’s applications business, Workday, Salesforce, and also the apps business part of Microsoft Dynamics 365. I think this is a very strong quarter by SAP, and the future here is very bright.
