Welcome to the Cloud Wars Minute — your daily news and commentary show, hosted by Cloud Wars Founder Bob Evans. Each episode provides insights and perspectives around the “reimagination machine” that is the Cloud.
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In this Cloud Wars Minute, Bob Evans reviews the Q4 earnings of SAP, for which its cloud revenue accounts for 40% of the company’s total revenue.
Highlights
00:30 — SAP had a “blockbuster” Q4, with a full year that was equally as powerful for the company, as CEO Christian Klein has led a remarkable transformation of the company, shifting them from solely being an enterprise software company.
01:21 — SAP’s cloud revenue now accounts for 40% of the company’s total revenue. For Q4 alone, SAP’s Cloud ERP product, the S/4HANA Cloud, grew by 101% in revenue. RISE with SAP, the company’s customer engagement program, is “booming,” notes Bob. More customers are opting to use the service to gain access to “huge volumes of intelligence about how to optimize these deployments that SAP has from thousands and thousands of customers.”
02:05 — For the entire year, SAP’s cloud revenue was up 33%, for a total of $13.69 billion for the year.
02:25 — SAP has a metric called “total cloud backlog” which encompasses all of its future contracted business that has yet to be recognized, for which the total revenue is $37.3 billion.
02:39 — Bob says a “big part of the company’s resurgence in the cloud” has been SAP’s business technology program, which falls under its platform-as-a-service (PaaS) category. PaaS revenue was up 53%, for a total revenue of $1.73 billion.
03:00 — SAP’s Q4 was powerful, notes Bob. Klein has just taken over as CEO in April of 2020, right as the pandemic was causing many disruptions in industries across the world. Klein has proven “the total opposite” of what was expected of him over the past two-and-a-half years, leading a remarkable turnaround at SAP. This specific topic is also covered in Bob’s Cloud Wars News report today: The New SAP Crushes Q4: Cloud ERP Soars 101%, Cloud Now 40% of Total Revenue.