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In today's Cloud Wars Minute, I examine why SAP's biggest competitive challenge may soon come from OpenAI and Anthropic rather than traditional enterprise software rivals.
Highlights
00:00 — SAP released its Q2 numbers last week, and a couple of interesting things happened there. First of all, strong Q2 cloud revenue growth, 24%. But even higher than that was its backlog growth, which went up 26%. CEO Christian Klein tied that specifically to the company's transformation, started about two years ago, to shift more and more of the sales effort from the direct channel to the indirect channel.
00:56 — It had resellers whose big concern a number of years ago was, "Well, what margin am I going to get? What discount do I get?" Today, the focus, through the efforts of Chief Partner Officer Karl Fahrbach and Klein, has shifted very, very much toward, "How do we get successful outcomes? How do we ensure these AI deployments happen smoothly, rapidly, and effectively at the customer site?"
01:29 — It's about $7.2 billion. Within that, the Cloud ERP Suite was up 27% to $6.4 billion, and the current cloud backlog, that 26% jump, pushed it to $26.3 billion. It said growth for full-year 2026 will be somewhere between 23% and 25%. I've penciled it in here as 24%, and that will come in right at about $30 billion.
02:28 — Klein said, "The growth for our indirect channel in Q2 again significantly outpaced our direct channel growth," and this reflects, he said, a successful go-to-market transformation. He has revised the company's leadership, its product portfolio, the impression the market has about ERP and what SAP Cloud ERP means, and how the whole notion at the highest level of the autonomous enterprise sinks in.
04:20 — Now there's enterprise applications, agents, AI, and data vendors, and this growth streak it's had in the mid-20s has been very impressive. So the biggest challenge SAP has going forward will come, in some form that's unclear right now, from OpenAI and Anthropic, and exactly how those they are going to parlay their early focus on models into the whole agentic AI movement in the agents and workflow space.
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