SAP ERP Business Growing in the Cloud
SAP reported its third quarter fiscal 2017 financial results on Oct. 19, demonstrating the positive impact of the enterprise application software firm's move to the cloud.
For the quarter, revenue was reported at €5.6B for a four percent year-over-year gain. Of note, the cloud pieces of SAP's business are the fastest growing and also now represent the majority of the enterprise software vendor's revenues.
“The reality is we've added more cloud ERP customers in seven months than some competitors have added in seven years,” Bill McDermott, CEO of SAP said during company's earnings call.
Helping to power all of SAP's cloud aspirations is the company's S/4HANA platform, which McDermott said is built on a consistent data model, regardless of its deployment method. He noted that the S/4HANA generational upgrade cycle is still in a very early stages, and it represents a massive multiyear growth opportunity.
Among SAP's broader portfolio, McDermott said that the SAP Hybris customer engagement solution achieved strong double-digit new cloud bookings growth, as well as double-digit growth and software revenue. He added that SAP Ariba now has 3 million companies in 180 countries trading more than USD 1 trillion in goods and services annually on the Ariba network.
SAP's Concur division now helps nearly 50 million end users process travel and expenses. McDermott added that Concur's travel management solution helped emergency workers to points of need in Texas and Florida as 11,000 federal employees were deployed from across the United States in record time.
During the quarter, SAP announced the acquisition of Gigya, which is a customer identity and access management vendor.
“This will further enhance SAP's commerce solutions by allowing companies to better manage customer's profile, preference, opt-in and consent settings with customers maintaining control of their data at all times,” McDermott said. “This is especially timely, given the March deadline to comply with GDPR in 2018. We're pretty excited about our unique position to capitalize on that market opportunity.”
Sean Michael Kerner is a senior editor at EnterpriseAppsToday and InternetNews.com. Follow him on Twitter @TechJournalist.
Sean Michael is a writer who focuses on innovation and how science and technology intersect with industry, technology Wordpress, VMware Salesforce, And Application tech. TechCrunch Europas shortlisted her for the best tech journalist award. She enjoys finding stories that open people's eyes. She graduated from the University of California.
