SAP full-year 2021: Revenue nudges up 1%, cloud growth up 17%

SAP has announced full-year 2021 financial results, indicating a 2% increase in revenue to €27.842bn, with cloud revenue up 17% to €9.418bn, 34% of the total.

It did so a full calendar year after announcing “business transformation” service Rise with SAP, which bundles managed cloud infrastructure and managed services into one contract.

Rise has been at the forefront of the supplier’s messaging over the past 12 months. In the results statement, it emphasised what it considers to be highlights in the adoption of Rise.

“Rise with SAP continued to gain traction after a successful launch in January 2021,” it stated. “SAP saw strong demand from companies of all sizes and closed deals with more than 650 customers in the fourth quarter, winning more than 1,300 customers since launch.

“Large customers such as Adobe, Panasonic Corporation, Mahindra & Mahindra, Fresenius SE, IBM, Allianz Technology, CVS, Unipart Group, Samsung SDS and Siemens selected this offering. Additional wins included Philippine Airlines, Software AG, Banco Sabadell, Amadeus, Standard Chartered Bank, Fisker Inc. and Europcar Mobility Group.”

Rise with SAP is a means of enticing customers to the cloud and getting them onto the supplier’s core business applications suite based on its high-speed columnar database Hana.

Twinings Ovaltine is the latest in a roster of UK customers to publicly endorse the Rise service. It joins Briggs of Burton, a process engineering company; Inchcape, a London-based automotive sector company; EG Group, a petrol station and food retailer; and Asda.

SAP’s flagship enterprise resource planning (ERP) system, S/4 Hana, launched in February 2015, is now reported to have 18,800 customers, according to the financial results statement, up 18% year on year. The increase from 2019 to 2020 was 16%, which suggests a gentle incline in adoption.

“The magnitude of our cloud strength is evident,” said SAP CEO Christian Klein. “More and more companies are choosing SAP to help them transform their businesses, build resilient supply chains and become sustainable enterprises as they move to the cloud. This momentum is reflected in the tremendous success of Rise with SAP, our signature cloud offering.”

SAP’s other, apparently “non-signature”, cloud properties include the acquired businesses Ariba, Success Factors and Concur.

Luka Mucic, chief financial officer at SAP, said it was “confident that we will continue our Q4 current cloud backlog growth in 2022”.

The supplier took the occasion to announce its intent to acquire a majority stake of Taulia, a provider of working capital management systems.

It also mentioned SAP Cloud for Sustainable Enterprises, which is said to bring together a “portfolio of solutions that enables businesses to holistically manage sustainability performance”. With this, it said, companies can manage their “green line” with business process technology to identify, quantify, analyse and act on data through their end-to-end operations.

SAP also declared its commitment to achieve net zero along the value chain in 2030 – 20 years earlier than originally stated.