Enterprise software giant SAP has released its results for the third quarter of 2021.
The company is a significant player in the customer experience space as the majority owner of experience management firm Qualtrics, as well as providing its own CRM solution.
The results beat market expectations, with the company identifying the strength of its cloud business as a key driver, with cloud revenue up 20%. SAP said its holistic digital transformation offering, Rise with SAP, was another highlight, having seen adoption from a number of large clients such as Asda and EG Group.
“Our strategy is clearly working,” said Christian Klein, SAP CEO. “Customers are choosing SAP for their business transformation in the cloud. We see record adoption of our applications and our platform. This has resulted in strong acceleration of our cloud growth.”
Other highlights included the fact that:
- Revenue rose 5% to $7.7 billion for the third quarter
- Current cloud backlog grew by 22% in the third quarter
- Its ERP system S/4HANA attracted 500 new customers, totalling 17,500 – up by 16% year over year
“This has been an excellent quarter across all key financial metrics,” said Luka Mucic, CFO. “We are seeing sustained, strong progress in SAP’s transformation. Our cloud business is growing at an accelerating pace and has led to our improved full year outlook.”
Earlier this year, the company partnered with Google Cloud on cloud business transformation, expanding on an earlier strategic partnership formed in 2017. The partnership is aimed at migrating critical business systems to the cloud, as well as leveraging Google Cloud’s AI and machine learning capabilities.
“This new partnership will enable customers to seamlessly bring their most critical business systems and applications to a future-proof, secure, and low-latency environment and to run them sustainably, on the industry’s cleanest cloud,” said Rob Enslin, president, Google Cloud, at the time.
