SAP going after Salesforce, Workday "with everything we have" says CEO McDermott

Salesforce "has had a free run of it with cloud sales. No more"

SAP's CEO, Bill McDermott, punctuated the enterprise software giant's fourth quarter keynote today by announcing all-out war against "business cloud companies" such as Salesforce.com and Workday, as he pledged that SAP's continuing push into the cloud would start to earn serious money in 2014.

"SAP is 20 times more profitable than Salesforce.com," said McDermott.

"We have 20 times more customers than Workday. These companies don't make money. Now we've declared we're going to be 'the' cloud company, we're going to go after those line of business cloud companies with everything we have."

McDermott boasted that SAP, which today announced a software-related service revenue increase of 11 per cent - totalling €14.03bn - marking the company's fourth year of double-digit growth in the cloud, has a "robust, fully-integrated human capital management solution powered by HANA".

As a result, he stated that "Salesforce.com has a had a free run of it with cloud sales for some time. No more. We're winning a lot of transactions and they are big in terms of transaction opportunities."

McDermott described software services company Ariba, which SAP acquired for $4.3bn in 2012, as "a fundamental growth story" for SAP.

Jim Hagemann Snabe, who recently stepped down as co-CEO to become a supervisory board member, added that "it's time to discuss what it takes to run cloud not for consumer toys, but business."

"Some people said we were late in the cloud, but we've just accelerated to be number one."

Hagemann Snabe said cloud will be key to the "reinvention of SAP, and the industry, through HANA and SAP through all our innovations".

"We predicted data would move off the slow disk, and be managed in columns in the main memory," he said.

"We predicted it would move off premise, and into the cloud. And we predicted people would be on the move and conduct business from secure mobile solutions."

"Over the last four years we have extended our leadership in the core, and grown at least twice as fast as our competitors."

SAP announced full-year revenue of €664m for SAP HANA alone for 2013, with a revenue of €1.2bn in total since it launched in 2010.