In today’s Cloud Wars Minute, I examine how SAP’s AI-first strategy helped drive 26% cloud revenue growth and why Christian Klein believes the momentum is accelerating.
Highlights
00:01 — We had some interesting numbers from SAP last week that I talked about: Q3 cloud revenue up 26% to seven and a half billion, and its cloud backlog up 28% to $27 billion. I wanted to chat a little bit today about Christian Klein, the SAP CEO. He said there are three reasons why AI has been so important in helping to generate these sorts of numbers.
00:37 — Here’s what he said: There’s certainly better technology capable now with AI to help accelerate these migrations, but the big thing, he said, is getting better business outcomes and being able to focus on those. The second thing he said: AI and the enhancements there make the suite, the SAP Business Suite, relative to best-of-breed. He said it makes it much more attractive.
01:12 — And he said the Business AI platform overall has been a huge driver for customers, and especially in this area now around the Business Data Cloud. He said that is the thorny issue that’s going to unleash the potential for AI to come in and really help drive these better business outcomes.
02:28 — One of the reasons, I think, is because SAP has been not only going all in on AI for the last few years, but in addition to that, I think Klein has always kept uppermost in his mind: What are the outcomes that are most important for our customers? The business outcomes most important for them, and are we putting the right amount of emphasis on helping deliver those?
03:04 — The important thing here about that is that the Business Data Cloud is unifying all this stuff that SAP has been putting together over the last five decades. How companies work, where their data is, what their processes are like, the industry-specific nature of what they have, and I think this Business Data Cloud, with the various ideas that Klein put forward, I think that’s going to be the most important.
