Cloud services come good for SAP in 2021 • The Register

ERP specialist SAP saw Q4 cloud revenue jump 28 per cent compared with the same period a year earlier to hit €2.61bn

In preliminary results, total revenue for calendar 2021 was up 6 per cent year-on-year to €7.98bn – a marked contrast to the car crash financials served up by SAP for 2020.

Customer migration to the vendor’s latest in-memory ERP platform was sluggish prior to initiatives SAP put in place to convince customers to migrate. The prelims show those plans are working.

Total cloud and software was up six per cent to €6.99bn and services grew three per cent to €99m. Within this, SAP S/4HANA cloud revenue was up 65 per cent to €329m. On-prem software licenses took a commensurate hit though and revenue was down 14 per cent to €1.46bn.

CEO Christian Klien, said:

“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, as well as excellent growth across our entire portfolio. Our growth acceleration points to even greater potential ahead.”

One new customer to sign up to SAP’s S/4HANA cloud service is Twinings Ovaltine, a marketer of tea and other hot beverages. It used the RISE with SAP initiative designed to make the move to the cloud less complex.

Twinings Ovaltine, the name behind a 300-year-old tea brand, picked RISE with SAP on Microsoft Azure, supported by SAP Business Technology Platform and SAP Ariba solutions, to lead its cloud ERP transition.

The pre-canned announcement does not say which ERP platform the beverage brand is moving from and where it is going. RISE with SAP promises to lift and shift ERP installations such as SAP ECC generation to the cloud and prepare for the transition to its more recent S/4HANA platform. Or Twinings could move to the new ERP platform at the same time as the cloud transition.

For the full year, SAP preliminary results show total revenue was up two per cent year-on-year to €27.84bn. It’s smaller than US enterprise software rival Oralce’s $40bn or so annual revenue but in the same ballpark.

Anticipated S/4HANA cloud revenue was up 46 per cent to €1.09bn, SAP said.

Last year, the German software giant more or less bet the farm on its cloud lift-shift-and-transform offer dubbed RISE with SAP.

It has previously attracted criticism from users over a lack of clarity and use cases. ®