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 discuss how SAP is pulling ahead of its competitors in the cloud enterprise apps market.
Highlights
00:14 — SAP is decisively outpacing all of its major applications competitors. If you look at the most recent quarter financial results for its apps businesses: SAP grew 27% to $5.1 billion. Microsoft Dynamics 365 up 19% (it doesn’t release revenue figures for Dynamics 365 yet). Workday was up 16% to just over $2 billion.
01:13 — Oracle’s cloud apps business overall was up 9% to $3.6 billion. Salesforce’s apps business was up 8%, to $10 billion. The last four quarters, SAP’s cloud revenue was up 24%, then 25%, 25%, 27%. So as that cloud business gets bigger, it’s growing faster. If you look at its current cloud backlog, you see an even more striking growth rate.
02:38 — What matters about this is that you’ve got customers out there who’ve got a huge range of different cloud vendors they could look to for applications. Certainly, in the Cloud Wars Top 10, these are very big, highly capable, wealthy, very ambitious cloud vendors here going after this. Yet we see an outsized performance by SAP.
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03:25 — The closest one to SAP in growth rate was Microsoft. And SAP’s growth rate was almost 50% higher. You’ve got a combination of things going on over at SAP. I call it the Four Horsemen: Business Data Cloud, Business Technology Platform, Business AI and now Business Suite.
04:15 — It’s meeting the needs of customers more and more directly now. As this whole apps business flips over — now where more and more AI is going to be part of it — it’s also: Who’s got the data cloud? Who’s got the platform? Who’s got the combination of apps and agents together? We’ll see if SAP can continue this.
