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.
This episode is sponsored by Acceleration Economy’s Cloud Wars Top 10 Course, available on demand. The course defines the vision driving the cloud industry forward and explores how organizations are pushing the boundaries of what is possible in the cloud.
In today’s Cloud Wars Minute, I dissect SAP’s thriving cloud narrative, CEO Christian Klein’s insights, and the projection of $23.4 billion in cloud revenue by 2025.
Highlights
00:17 — SAP has been determined to become the world’s leading applications provider, both in the cloud and on-premises. For Q4, the expectation is for cloud revenue to be up about 24% to just over four and a half billion dollars. My expectation for the full year is cloud revenue up about 23% to $15.35 billion.
01:19 — Klein talked about big contracts that are coming and a big ramp-up in 2024 and 2025. Klein said that RISE business-transformation-as-a-service continues to be a very strong factor in that. SAP’s also been very strong in cloud ERP throughout much of 2023.
02:39 — It’s got high growth in its Business Technology Platform, which is the unifying layer that pulls all these different applications together. It’s so much simpler now for customers to integrate their SAP environments with SAP as well as non-SAP applications. SAP has a long-stated target: cloud revenue of $23.4 billion for calendar 2025.
03:31 — I named Klein as the Cloud Wars CEO of the Year for 2024. I have written extensively and did a 30-minute video interview with Klein about some of his thoughts on where the company is, how he got there, and where SAP is headed in the future. So-called experts have said “SAP won’t make it in the cloud.” It’s a bunch of nonsense; Klein and the company have done a great job.
04:15 — So, we’re looking at strong growth that we’ll see reported later this month for Q4 of 2023. And then the company is projecting more good things throughout 2024. That means better opportunities for customers.
