SAP CEO: We're growing faster in the Cloud than SFDC and Oracle

While Oracle has recently dominated the Cloud agenda through its alliances with the likes of Salesforce.com and Microsoft, the arch-enemy over in Germany has been ploughing its own furrow. 

"Cloud is the top strategic priority for SAP, and we are seeing the IT industry is moving to the Cloud," says SAP co-CEO Bill McDermott. "This quarter marked a significant milestone for SAP in our ambition to lead in the Cloud. On a sequential quarterly growth basis, SAP's Cloud growth accelerated once again, and we are growing faster than Oracle, Salesforce.com and NetSuite, making us one of the fastest-growing companies in the Cloud.

"Our rapid growth is impacting competitors like Workday as well, who have seen deceleration in their bookings growth from triple-digit growth over a year back to around 30% in their latest quarter. We now have reached an annual Cloud revenue run rate of over EUR 930 million. And with approximately 30 million users in the Cloud, SAP has the largest subscriber base in the Cloud market.

McDermott says such success is down to having the right Cloud strategy in place and not setting up complicated partnership deals. "SAP is the only company with a consistent portfolio offering true simplicity in the Cloud," he argues. "In response, the competition is teaming up with multiple Cloud partnerships and creating patchwork solutions, which result in increased complexity for customers. For example, our most notable competitor has chosen to outsource their cloud innovation.

"In contrast, SAP decided to innovate in the cloud and offer our customers maximum choice and security in the Cloud. Customers can choose SAP public Cloud for line of business solutions or a secure private cloud for core enterprise solutions. And even more importantly, customers can seamlessly integrate any SAP Cloud solution with their existing on-premise IT landscape. We call this 'innovation without disruption in the Cloud'."

McDermott highlights key line of business successes in the Cloud for SAP. "In human capital management, we're winning more deals with our SuccessFactors HR solution against Workday than ever before," he says. "For example, The Weather Channel, the most popular source of weather news and information in the US, has chosen SAP SuccessFactors enterprise bundle and Employee Central over Workday, supporting the transformation of human resources to significantly reduce day-to-day administration of employees and becoming a strategic partner in the company to management.

"Our Cloud CRM solution has gained significant traction in the latest quarter. We accelerated our cloud development in CRM, and we now have a full portfolio of CRM solutions, including sales, service and marketing, that can be consumed either in the public or the private cloud. Our CRM momentum has been validated by multiple competitive wins against Salesforce.com, including CLAAS, T-Mobile and Nespresso.

"In procurement and business network, our Ariba business continues to expand. We're transacting nearly $465 billion of commerce over the Ariba business network. This represents an increase of 27% year-over-year. And over 1.1 million companies are now connected on the Ariba Network, many of which see this network as a front-end CRM system to drive business growth and new opportunities across the global marketplace."

As with all things at SAP these days, all roads lead back at some point to HANA. "We made a bold move to run our entire application portfolio on the private Cloud with the announcement of the HANA Enterprise Cloud," explains McDermott. "This is a unique combination of the transformative power of HANA with the simplicity of the cloud. Customers using HANA enterprise cloud, they don't have to worry about the infrastructure for their HANA system, and we expect this offer to dramatically increase time to value, as well as reduce risk and IT costs for our customers.

"Our customers are clearly seeing the business value of the HANA enterprise cloud. For example, Florida Crystals, a leading sugar producer in North America, was one of the first customers to use HANA enterprise cloud to run the SAP Business Suite. With this, Florida Crystals is able to analyze their business in real time with increased insight into their business as it happens, from the supply chain to the customers. At the same time, the simplicity of HANA enterprise cloud allows Florida Crystals to implement HANA quickly without worrying about infrastructure tasks."

McDermott has a short replay to Oracle which has claimed that it does not see HANA traction in the market. "Why Oracle might not see us in the marketplace, they may be spending too much time in internal meetings because we're out there," he says. "And I can tell you that their customers know we're there and our customers certainly know we're there."