SAP’s Klein bets on cloud stickiness

SAP has posted cloud revenue of €4.2bn, up 25% for the second quarter of 2024. The company said the increase in cloud revenue was underpinned by 33% Cloud ERP Suite revenue growth. The move to the cloud also showed up as a decline in software licence revenue, which fell by 27% compared with the same period last year.

According to the transcript of the earnings call posted on Seeking Alpha, revenue from SAP’s Cloud ERP Suite grew a third to €3.4bn.

During the call, SAP CEO Christian Klein discussed uptake of the company’s Grow software, a cloud-only product aimed at smaller businesses and subsidiaries of larger organisations. “About 60% of customers in Q2 were net new,” he said. “We have won almost 1,500 customers. Many of them started their journey with S/4 public cloud finance and are now expanding their SAP ERP footprint.”

Klein claimed the “grow formula” was working. “We have the right ingredients in place in our Cloud ERP Suite,” he said. “Rise brings best-of-suite ERP to our installed base, enabling large enterprises to transform deeply.

“Grow is the perfect choice for greenfield projects for net new customers and subsidiaries of large companies, always in the public cloud. The BTP [Business Technology Platform] brings everything together as the leading platform for B2B transformation.”

He said the firm’s strategy involves moving organisations onto Rise, Grow and BTP first. “We then go into expand mode with our line of business solutions,” said Klein. “Finally, business AI [artificial intelligence] is infused everywhere and lifts the whole portfolio to a new level.

“In every ERP and LOB [line of business] deal we closed, our AI strategy played a key role,” he continued. “And AI had a direct impact on our bookings. In the second quarter, almost 20% of all deals included premium AI use cases. And this is just the beginning. Customers have clear plans to expand their AI consumption on their Rise and Grow transformation journeys.”

Commenting on SAP’s cloud renewal rate, Klein said: “Once a customer has made this move to the cloud and you’re running the most mission-critical systems of your company in the cloud, the business is sticky. It was sticky in the on-premise days and you see it in the support revenue, and it will be also sticky on the cloud side of the house, despite, of course, it’s now a very modular stack.”

He was also asked about SAP’s ability to convince customers to buy into the new AI-enabled technologies it develops and “migrate every few years”. “We now have the first use cases live for Joule in HR, finance and the supply chain space,” said Klein. “Everything we do in order management is already enabled via Joule, and the end users will benefit a lot from efficiency gains.”

He said the Joule AI copilot enabled content search across HR, travel or supply chain-related content, delivering “a massive efficiency booster”.