SAP Soars Again in Q1: Cloud ERP 34%, Backlog 28%

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.

In today’s Cloud Wars Minute, I unpack why SAP’s growth isn’t just impressive — it’s redefining the cloud applications landscape.

Highlights

00:16 — In what used to be called the enterprise app space, SAP has once again set the pace. Its Cloud ERP suite was up 34%; its current cloud backlog was up 28%. The cloud revenue for the first quarter was up 27% and now totals almost $5.4 billion. That is impressive in its own right.

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01:07 — That $5.39 billion represents more than 55% of SAP’s total Q1 revenue of about $9.73 billion. SAP is growing about three times as fast as Salesforce and Oracle’s apps business. It’s growing about 50–60% faster than Workday, and 30–40% faster than Microsoft’s Dynamics 365 applications business.

02:09 — SAP has reestablished itself in the cloud as the applications vendor that businesses are turning to. While its overall revenue is much smaller than that of Salesforce, the world’s largest applications vendor, SAP’s growth rate is stunning. The rise of agents and the new Agent Wars, could trigger some different shifts. But for now, SAP is far outperforming its rivals in growth.

03:19 — It has the Four Horsemen of Business Transformation. It’s got its business suite of applications. It’s got its Business Technology Platform, on which everything is built. It’s got its Business Data Cloud. And what is that fourth one? Business AI.

04:05 — SAP is in a great position here. It thinks it is going to continue to grow in this range of 25% or more. Both the CFO Dominik Asam and CEO Christian Klein said on this earnings release that they see there’s a lot of uncertainty or volatility in the applications market. But in spite of that, quarter after quarter, SAP has far outperformed its competitors.

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