SAP focuses on the cloud at Davos

Speaking to the thousands of rich and famous at their little World Economic Forum get together in Davos, Switzerland, SAP Chief Executive Bill McDermott made a couple of interesting comments to the assembled media and big wigs. The company will focus on smaller acquisitions going forward, so it looks like the recent Concur deal may be the last of the big spending, as SAP focuses on filling in the smaller gaps in its cloud portfolio.

Talking of cloud, that part of the business continues to outstrip SAP’s traditional areas, as more and more customers turn to the less-expensive option of as-a-service delivery for all kinds of supply chain and productivity systems. Despite that shift, the CEO has no intention of splitting the company into two (as is the growing trend), to divide the cloud and on-premises delivery options. With firm growth and plenty of forward looking plans in the pipeline to continue to address its core verticals, SAP and its implementation partners will still be piloting a juggernaut business into enterprises and, increasingly, smaller companies into 2015 and beyond with HANA, Business One and B1 Cloud at the helm.

SAP’s cloud business keeps up its rapid growth in the company’s latest results, with the company claiming over 5,800 SAP HANA customers and 1,850 SAP Business Suite customers. The company is now looking to earn between €7.5 and €8.0 Billion from cloud subscriptions and the attending support revenue by 2020. That will make SAP keen to win new customers to drive that growth, which is encouraging news for partners and the ecosystem.

For any company that does business with SAP, a recent note of interest is that, after having a shot at Oracle (a company well known for its over-complicated terms), the Campaign for Clear Licensing is now asking for comments about SAP and fellow giant IBM. The aim is to get these companies to writer clearer terms and conditions for contracts and provide improved and easier to access documentation.

There’s a feedback form accessible here, so if you’ve come across any obscure terms, changes to them that were unclear or other issues in your dealings with SAP, then let them know.

If you in the meanwhile are interested to look at cloud options for SAP software, come over to our SAP cloud solutions website. See you around!