by Tech Talk | Feb 1, 2023 | Articles
SAP says that it plans to cut 3 000 jobs, or 2.5% of its global workforce, and explore the sale of its remaining stake in Qualtrics, as the Germany software company looks to cut costs and focus on its cloud business.
SAP is the latest tech company to cut jobs after companies including Google, Microsoft and Amazon.com announced thousands of layoffs to cut costs as they brace for tougher economic conditions.
“We expect only a moderate cost saving impact for 2023, and a more pronounced one in 2024, about €300-million to €35- million in run-rate savings as of 2024,” chief financial officer Luka Mucic said in a call with journalists.
In Germany, where SAP is headquartered, the company will cut slightly more than 200 jobs.
The layoffs come after SAP reported a 30% revenue increase in its cloud business in the fourth quarter, helped by strong demand for its software.
SAP has also started the process to sell its stake in Qualtrics. It bought the company for US$8-billion in 2018 and took it public in 2021 at a valuation of nearly $21-billion.
Currently, survey-software seller Qualtrics has a market value of $7-billion and SAP has a 71% stake.
“[The sale] would result in a quite significant one-time gain,” Mucic said. “This would materially increase the profit performance of SAP, but it’s currently not reflected in the outlook.”
SAP forecast core operating profit of €8.8-billion to €8.9-billion at constant currencies for this year. It also expects cloud revenue at constant currencies for 2023 to rise to €15.3-billion to €15.7-billion, from €12.6-billion last year.
While analysts had raised concerns that SAP’S lucrative cloud business might take a hit with other companies tightening their budgets due to economic uncertainty, SAP has been signing more customers.
“We are going to announce a unique strategic partnership with BMW betting on SAP on all dimensions — one of the biggest deals ever, which was signed yesterday,” CEO Christian Klein said. — Reuters
Editor@tech-talk.co.za
by Tech Talk | Nov 16, 2022 | Articles
SAP SE (NYSE: SAP) announced at the SAP TechEd conference the launch of a powerful new offering to drive the next wave of business transformation by unleashing the expertise of those who know best – business users.
Drawing on the unique depth and breadth of the SAP Business Technology Platform (BTP), SAP Build is a low-code solution that puts SAP’s world-class enterprise technology in the hands of business users, giving them direct, secure access to the end-to-end processes, data and context they need to make smarter decisions and drive innovation quickly.
The offering empowers business users with minimal technical expertise to create and augment enterprise applications, automate processes, and design business sites with drag-and-drop simplicity.
“SAP Build brings together the world’s most powerful business applications with a platform that’s been designed to rapidly unleash business users’ expertise,” said Juergen Mueller, member of the Executive Board and Chief Technology Officer of SAP. “In a volatile business landscape, SAP Build and the full suite of innovations we’re launching today – from our new partnership with Coursera to enhancements across our enterprise portfolio – help customers future-proof their business and extract maximum value from their technology investments.”
With SAP Build, business users have the full power of SAP BTP and business application data from SAP at their fingertips. Users can easily integrate systems; intelligently monitor, analyze, and automate processes; and build applications for the last mile of innovation – all without moving their data into an external system. With SAP Signavio solutions natively integrated, SAP Build users also get in-depth visibility into all their processes, so they know where to focus to achieve the greatest impact as they innovate and automate. More than 275,000 process reference points from 4,000 customers, as well as 1,300 use-case specific workflows and automations, let users instantly tap into the full spectrum of business expertise built into SAP’s technology. SAP Build also works with non-SAP systems. And the new SAP Builders program helps users ramp up quickly and connect with their peers via hands-on sessions and forums for sharing best practices.
“Given that the demand for contemporary digital solutions is greater than the ability of professional developers to supply them, IDC envisions that business professionals will become increasingly involved in initiatives to create digital solutions to solve pressing business problems,” said Arnal Dayaratna, Research Vice President, Software Development, IDC. “Worldwide, IDC expects more than 100 million business professionals will become involved in the production of digital solutions over the next ten years. SAP Build’s low-code development solutions empower business users to harness their domain expertise to rapidly build and iterate on digital solutions at scale.”
SAP Build is already demonstrating impact. “Thanks to SAP Build we easily built a better experience for our customers while dramatically reducing our development costs by 90%,” said Spencer Cook, XM Advocates Lead at Qualtrics, a leading experience-management company. “I was able to quickly build the application to enhance our customer reference program which is going to catapult customer satisfaction.”
As every company becomes a technology company, SAP also recognizes the increasing premium put on the skills and insights only professional developers can deliver. SAP is committed to upskilling two million developers worldwide by 2025 by tripling free learning offerings on the SAP Learning site, partnering with world-class learning platform provider Coursera Inc. to help people launch careers within the SAP ecosystem, and empowering underserved audiences in technology.
“I’m happy to announce that today SAP is launching an entry-level professional certificate on Coursera. This certificate is designed for learners of all backgrounds, with no college degree or industry experience required,” said Jeff Maggioncalda, CEO of Coursera Inc. “It will prepare learners for entry-level job roles and in some of the most in-demand fields. We’re honored to partner with SAP to increase access to job-related skills and to expand economic opportunity for everyone.”
These announcements come amid a host of innovations announced at SAP TechEd to help SAP customers and partners continue driving the transformations they need to stay successful. From an all-new native Web entry point for business apps, which increases productivity in the cloud and out of the box, to innovations across intelligent SAP applications, SAP Digital Supply Chain solutions and SAP solutions for sustainability– at SAP TechEd 2022 we’re unleashing the power of business. Read more in our news guide here.
Visit the SAP News Center.Follow SAP on Twitter at @SAPNews.
Editor@tech-talk.co.za
