SAP still not a force in cloud after sales cash drizzle
Q1 not quite the deluge of euros software biz hoped for
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German software maker SAP AG is facing an uphill battle to become a force in the cloud market after revealing subscription-based sales amounted to just €29m (£23.7m) in Q1.
This represents year-on-year growth of 625 per cent on the opening three months of 2011 but that's clearly from a minuscule base.
Total revenues were up eight per cent in constant currency to €3.35bn (£2.7bn) including a modest one per cent rise in traditional software sales to €637m, but software and related services fared better, up ten per cent to €2.62bn (£2.1bn).
The firm said it "moved swiftly" to overcome sales execution issues in North America where sales where it "saw a weaker performance than expected" and added that some European markets "started slower".
The HANA push - a platform of software and partner hardware - contributed €28m, and mobile added €21m.
The SuccessFactors acquisition, on a standalone basis, saw a 69 per cent year-on-year spike in Q1 billings from new biz customers, SAP said.
“We see strong momentum for our flagship in-memory platform SAP HANA, our cloud and mobile solutions, and our core applications and analytics products,” said SAP joint CEOs Bill McDermott and Jim Hagemann Snabe in a statement.
"SAP continues to help companies run like never before – helping to solve fundamental business challenges with unmatched industry expertise," they added. ®
COMMENTS
Re: I would not take that bet
Agree, SAP is trying to play Oracle's game of growth by acquisitions, but their company is not suited to chaos as usual like Oracle. They are very locked down and incremental, which is why all of their big customers like SAP. No surprises and steady as she goes. They are the IBM of ERP. Maybe they don't have the latest bells and whistle, but you probably don't need to be on the bleeding edge and they will get there at their own deliberate pace with no waves or sudden changes of direction.... I think SAP was baited into the "cloud" talk by Oracle saying that they are dinosaurs from the 80s with their big monolithic on-premise software. Very few SAP customers want fully SaaS applications. They like to keep an eye of that mission critical functionality.
SAP is really creating massive confusion with HANA. If it is an OLAP accelerator or in-memory DW, everyone gets it. When they started saying that HANA is going to be a full RDB and they are going after the RDB market aggressively, everyone started to get anxious that SAP is going down the lock-in path... not to mention that they are nowhere near ready to replace Oracle or DB2 as a full RDB, so why even mention it until you have something to sell.
@AC Posted Wednesday 25th April 2012 23:32 GMT
Yes, SAP is an internally solid company. But I also think they're putting too much accent on the success factors at the moment. So far couldn't see any confusions at my customers with HANA, they're all very happy about it. I can only say that the new ABAP language commands point to the existence of a RDB system on the application server.
Re: I would not take that bet
MaxDB is a toy. If you have a very small workload and don't need any advanced functionality, it might work... but that is the opposite of a SAP workload. Oracle and DB2 are way ahead of it. MaxDB doesn't have any indexing capabilities. It can't do pretty basic SQL functions like parallel queries or merges. No partitioning. No security... etc. It is not even an MS SQL competitor.
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