The false truth about cloud
However, the concealment of the truth is mutual. SAP CEO Christian Klein also does not dare to tell the truth to shareholders and financial analysts. He and his CFO Luka Mucic emphasize SAP's successes in the important cloud business. With superficially impressive growth and revenue figures, they want to prove SAP's cloud strategy is right.
"Our transition to the cloud business is progressing ahead of schedule and we have exceeded revenue expectations. Cloud revenues have now become SAP's largest revenue stream"Christian Klein, SAP Executive Board Spokesman and CEO, said at the presentation of the Q2 figures. His colleague on the Executive Board and CFO Luka Mucic added: "This quarter again demonstrates that our strategy is resonating, even in an increasingly challenging external environment. We continued to deliver strong revenue growth, exceeding revenue expectations and increasing profitability in the cloud."
Cloud computing is a megatrend and SAP has been running behind this trend for many years. However, the current cloud figures are obviously also convincing financial analysts. On July 21, Handelsblatt Online reported on the publication of the Q2 figures: SAP was also on the losing side. Following a forecast reduction, the shares of the software giant fell by 2.8 percent. "However, revenue growth, particularly in the important cloud business, suggests that the business is broadly doing well", said one stockbroker.
It's just as well that this stockbroker remains anonymous in the Handelsblatt. Two key factors have been overlooked here: Anyone who has invested many millions in SAP software for decades will not come out of the system without considerable disruption. Changing ERP software is more than switching from Porsche to Ferrari. SAP knows about the dependency of its existing customers. In this situation, it is easy for SAP to phase out and decommission the old software and offer the new solutions only as cloud software - SAP's existing customers must switch to cloud computing if they want to continue working with SAP software.
The cloud truth at SAP is very simple: It's not quality that counts, but availability. If there is no alternative, SAP's existing customers will buy more cloud from quarter to quarter - or they will switch ERP providers. Because SAP can control the supply of its own data centers (on-premises) and cloud computing almost at will, Christian Klein and Luka Mucic will also succeed in fooling the stock market players time and again. No one dares to tell the financial analysts the truth!
In conclusion, Christian Klein said at the Q2 analyst conference on July 21 of this year: "I would like to see analysts value our growth in the cloud a little more. We've always said it's a three-year transformation, and it was clear from the start that the first two years would be difficult."
