SAP Raises Sales, Profit Forecast on Improved Cloud Outlook
- Third-quarter sales topped estimates, operating profit in line
- More customers signed up for hybrid cloud platform S/4 Hana
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SAP SE reported sales that topped estimates and raised the low end of its profit outlook for the year, as more customers signed up for its flagship S/4 Hana business software.
Chief Executive Officer Bill McDermott is pivoting the Walldorf, Germany-based software maker toward an era in which enterprises can run their financial, logistics and HR software both in their own data centers and in an outsourced cloud. SAP sees online software subscriptions outpacing new on-premises licenses by 2018. As the top supplier of software crucial to customers’ operations, SAP is less vulnerable to losing revenue to cloud infrastructure software supplied by Amazon Web Services, Microsoft Corp.’s Azure and Google’s cloud offering, according to analysts.