SAP sees double-digit growth in software sales

SAP's Q2 2011 results show another impressive jump in software sales, with the vendor attributing continued strong demand for its products to a "structural change" in the IT market that has seen customers shifting more of their investments towards software.

The vendor argues the shift is the result of software becoming an increasingly important component of the technology stack in a datacentre.

The company has seen a 35 per cent growth in software revenue for Q2 2011, marking its sixth consecutive quarter of double-digit growth in non-IFRS software and software-related service revenue.

Werner Brandt, CFO of SAP, said: "The strong customer demand for our products positions us well to achieve our goal of at least €20bn (£17bn) in total annual revenue with a 35 per cent operating margin by the middle of the decade."

The company said its its in-memory analytics product SAP HANA had performed well in the quarter. HANA processes data within a system's RAM as opposed to being read from I/O disks, meaning it can deal with the data more quickly, and analyse more complicated data than traditional analytics solutions.

The company also said growth came from increased sales in its mobility solutions as well as its business analytics software Business Objects.

Separately, SAP said today that it would enhance its business analytics offering by teaming up with one of the world's biggest data managers, Google.

It will offer location-based data capabilities by allowing customers to interact with real-time information via Google Maps.

The software company claims that this will allow companies to analyse businesses in a geospatial context to understand and compare regional aspects of their operation.