Cloud revenues are just 4% of total 2013 revenues. Three of its senior cloud executives from SuccessFactors and Ariba acquisitions have moved on in the last year. Its own internally developed BYD shows little traction after years of investment.
Yet Bill McDermott claims “We are one of the few global tech companies that has successfully managed the transition to the cloud while growing our core business and improving our profitability at the same time”
On his blog, Vishal Sikka taking a dig at Oracle says
As industry leaders, we must do better. It behooves us to tell the truth to our customers, our partners and our employees. We do not serve our stakeholders well by mis-statements and omissions of key things we know to be true. “
But has SAP ever acknowledged HANA has penetrated less than 1% of its own customer base. If anything its fans will chime and ask to ignore the customer count of 251,000 on its own site. That btw means it has less than .1% of all Oracle, Microsoft and IBM database customers.
Here’s what’s baffling. Why does SAP not trade its maintenance revenues for free cloud and HANA licenses? In doing so, it will also unshackle its customers of grossly over priced partner data center, apps maintenance and upgrade charges which cloud vendors like Salesforce and NetSuite are showing can be delivered quantum more efficiently.
SAP runs financials for some of the largest companies in the world. It clearly wants to become the analytical engine of choice for them. But it has zero analytical credibility when it blatantly ignores the reality of its own financials and market share.
In Vishal’s own words “It has become something of a recurring theme, to mis-state and distort things.”
