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.
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In today’s Cloud Wars Minute, I explore SAP’s strong Q3 performance in-depth.
Highlights
00:00 — SAP just reported its Q3 numbers. SAP S/4HANA topped $1 billion in quarterly revenue for the first time. Total cloud revenue was $3.82 billion, up 23%.
01:03 — The current cloud backlog at SAP is up 25%, to $13.5 billion. Cloud ERP suite S/4HANA revenue is up 77%, to $1.01 billion; the backlog for that was up 66%, to $4.62 billion. Its business technology platform or PaaS (platform-as-a-service) category revenue was up 46% to $614 million. RISE, its go-to-market program for on-prem customers, now has more than 4,300 customers.
02:06 — Its GROW program now has 440 customers. SAP said those 440 are spread across 80 countries. So that shows there is a worldwide appeal for what SAP is doing in the cloud.
03:16 — Christian Klein has been unwavering in making that full and complete shift to being a cloud-first company. I think these quarterly results indicated that that progress is moving along very nicely. SAP estimates the potential incremental revenue for the 25,000 on-prem customers it’s hoping to pull into the cloud to be $27.5 billion.
04:18 — I think SAP has got everything in place to be able to give those customers very good reasons to consider sticking with SAP, in spite of heavy competition.
