In today’s Cloud Wars Minute, I look at SAP’s ambitious venture into the explosive GenAI revolution.
Highlights
00:16 — SAP is out to carve its own destiny. It’s investing $1.1 billion into its Business AI program. You may have heard recently that SAP has decided to enact layoffs. Its larger position is saying, “We encourage constantly our customers to change and build for the future and the new needs, expectations, and requirements that your customers will have.”
01:17 — SAP is now doing the same thing itself. I’m not trying to diminish its 8,000 layoffs, but many of those positions are going to be recreated in new parts of SAP to meet those new needs. So, Christian Klein, the CEO, said that by the end of the year, SAP will have about the same headcount.
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02:18 — So, there’ll be $1.1 billion invested in the new development. It’s added some big new elements to its very successful Rise with SAP program for companies that are migrating their SAP workloads and applications from on-premise to the cloud. Part of the enticement here is to say if you want all these great new GenAI capabilities, we’re delivering, you must be in the cloud.
03:36 — It calls the GenAI Revolution the greatest opportunity since the rise of the cloud. There’s no mistaking that. Ten days or so go on the Alphabet earnings call, Alphabet’s CEO, Sundar Pichai, devoted 100% of his opening remarks to GenAI. We’ve seen a similar focus with AWS results, as well as ServiceNow and IBM.
04:30 — SAP, which really invented the enterprise application market 50 years ago, is, through some of the steps Klein is taking here, saying “We want to continue to be at the forefront of this.”
