In an enterprise-apps and agents marketplace offering businesses a wide range of excellent alternatives, SAP’s ability to consistently win an outsized share of those customers is the primary factor that has propelled it to the #4 spot on the Cloud Wars Top 10 rankings.
The market-leading growth rates that SAP has generated across the past eight quarters — topping competitors by anywhere from 50% to 200% — directly reflect the booming customer demand for SAP’s products and services now assembled into what I call the Four Horsemen of Business Transformation:
- Business Suite
- Business AI
- Business Technology Platform
- Business Data Cloud
Add to that a superb global ecosystem program and an ambitious mindset on strategic partnerships, and it’s clear that SAP is powerfully positioned to be the world leader in apps/agents/AI/data — can’t just say “applications” anymore! — for years to come. I’ll share the competitive set’s latest quarterly growth numbers and add that this spread is a very good reflection of what we’ve been seeing across the past 18-24 months:
| Company | Growth Rate | Cloud Apps Revenue | Quarter Ended |
|---|---|---|---|
| SAP | 27% | $6.14B | 9/30/25 |
| Microsoft Dynamics 365 | 18% | (not disclosed) | 9/30/25 |
| Workday | 14.6% | $2.24B | 10/31/25 |
| Oracle | 11% | $3.9B | 11/30/25 |
| Salesforce | 8.6% | $10.3B | 10/31/25 |
SAP has diligently overhauled its massive product portfolio to make it easier for customers to pick which apps and solutions they want to consume and in which order. In the past, the SAP model was very different: rather than offering customers the a la carte option, the menu was quite limited: you pretty much had to order the whole elephant, and your only options were rare, medium, or well done.
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That all changed five years ago with CEO Christian Klein‘s unconditional shift to the cloud, a move that forced SAP to focus as heavily on customer preferences and requirements and outcomes as it did on software engineering.
And, as outlined above in the “Four Horsemen” model, SAP has expanded bullishly beyond its enterprise-apps roots, particularly with the SAP Data Cloud that underpins the company’s ambitious moves into expanded capabilities around data and AI.
Other examples of SAP’s willingness to evolve — sometimes radically — with the times include:
- its bullish move in sovereign clouds to meet the needs and expectations particularly of its large base of European customers;
- its data partnerships with Google Cloud (BigQuery) as well as Databricks and Snowflake; and
- its Rise and Grow programs to simplify and accelerate the cloud migrations for its 20,000+ on-prem customers.
Final Thought
It’s been fun to watch the company that once insisted that its customers must conform to the requirements of its software now offer a vast range of product options, consumption choices, partnership opportunities, and open technologies.
And that hyper-evolution, powered by CEO Klein, is why SAP has been winning huge shares of enterprise customers’ hearts and minds and wallets, and that is precisely why I have moved SAP up to #4 from #5 on the Cloud Wars Top 10. Because we must remember: in the Cloud Wars, the biggest winners are always — always! — the customers.
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