In the wickedly competitive and rapidly evolving enterprise-apps market, SAP continues to outgrow all of its ambitious Cloud Wars Top 10 competitors by outsized proportions, including outpacing both Salesforce and Oracle by a factor of 3X.
Those numbers are strategically vital because they are direct reflections of customer choices in a market segment jammed with enterprise-apps vendors that have consistently demonstrated over the past 20 years the ability to meet and exceed the needs and expectations of the world’s most-demanding businesses.
Indeed, over the past year SAP has consistently outperformed those excellent competitors and has actually increased its lead relative to them, and the graphics below reflects the starkness of those comparative revenue results.
MOST-RECENT QUARTERLY GROWTH RATES and REVENUE
| Company | Grth Rate | Revenue | Quarter Ended |
|---|---|---|---|
| SAP | 27% | $5.09B | Dec. 31 |
| Microsoft (Dyn. 365) | 19% | ??* | Dec. 31 |
| Workday (Subsc. rev) | 16% | $2.04B | Jan. 31 |
| Oracle | 9% | $3.6B | Feb. 28 |
| Salesforce | 8% | $10B | Jan. 31 |
While there is certainly some cyclical variability to the quarterly results for each of these companies, I do not think that’s a factor in the relative results for these most-recent quarterly figures. In fact, in SAP’s case, Christian Klein‘s company has demonstrated over the past 12 months the unique ability to boost its growth rate even as its applications business gets larger.
These figures for SAP over the past four quarters show a remarkably consistent pattern of rising growth rates throughout 2024 for cloud revenue, Business Suite (formerly Cloud ERP Suite) revenue, and current cloud backlog.
Taken together, those show a powerful apps business that is growing more rapidly as its gets bigger, with future growth all but assured due due its fast-growing backlogs throughout the year.
SAP REVENUE AND GROWTH FIGURES THROUGHOUT 2024
| Category | Q1 | Q2 | Q3 | Q4 |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Cloud | 24%, $4.2B | 25%, $4.5B | 25%, $4.7B | 27%, $5.1B |
| Bus. Suite | 32%, $3.4B | 33%, $3.7B | 34%, $3.9B | 35%, $4.2B |
| Current Cl. | 27%, $15.3B | 28%, $16B | 25%, $16.6B | 32%, $19.6B |
| Backlog Total Cl. | — | — | — | 43%, $68.3B |
By any measure, those are outstanding numbers — and when we take into account the increasing disparity between SAP’s accelerating performance throughout 2024 versus the flat or occasionally declining growth numbers posted by its competitors, we have to congratulate SAP on an outstanding achievement in a bitterly contested and high-stakes market that plays a crucial role the global economy.
