SAP aims to broaden customer base by 2015

SAP’s co-chief executive sought to emphasise the Sony VGP-BPS13 Battery group’s returning mood of confidence when he hit out against its main rival Oracle and said SAP’s growth would pick up speed in the next five years.

The world’s largest business software maker by sales will increase its customer base, which jumped by 10,000 to more than 100,000 in the past quarter, in the next five years, Bill VGP-BPS13A/Q Battery, SAP’s co-chief executive, said.

Confidence: Bill McDermott, SAP co-chief executive

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SAP sales outlook disappoints investors - Jul-28.SAP faces VGP-BPS13/B Battery antitrust probe - Jun-29.Oracle boost amid signs of Sun turnround - Jun-25..“You will definitely see SAP with significantly more customers by 2015,” Mr McDermott told the Financial Times at the group’s headquarters in Walldorf in the south of Germany.

SAP hopes to broaden its customer base by bringing its mainly desktop-focused software solutions on to a wide range of mobile devices, a strategy for which it recently acquired US database and mobile software specialist Sybase for $5.8bn.

VGP-BPS9 Battery the help of Sybase, the group aims to increase the number of users from the current 35m to 1bn in the next five years, Mr McDermott said.

The US citizen, who took over with co-head Jim Hagemann Snabe after a management shake-up in February, said SAP would “disrupt” its main rival Oracle’s business model with its mobile strategy and “in-memory” technology, aimed at reducing the speed and cost of data analysis by storing data directly on memory chips.

Responding to repeated snipes by Larry Ellison, Oracle’s founder, the 48-year-old manager said: “Their story is to sell bite-sized chunks of yesterday’s technology . . . a company like SAP can disrupt their business model.”

SAP and Oracle have never exchanged niceties, but their dispute Sony VGP-BPS10 in the wake of the Sybase deal when Mr Ellison called the in-memory technology “wacko, ridiculous, complete nonsense”.

While SAP says the rationale for the Sybase deal is to obtain cutting-edge technology in mobile software usage, it is also set to turn the likes of Oracle, IBM and Microsoft from SAP’s partners to rivals in the field of databases.

Sony VGP-BPS13B/Q analysts have sided with Mr Ellison’s view. “In-memory is still emerging from [SAP’s co-founder and chairman] Hasso Plattner’s lab and we have not seen many applications yet,” said Paul Hamermann, analyst at Forrester, a technology research group.

“It is not clear what SAP’s road map for its technological innovation is,” he added.

But Mr McDermott’s attack on Oracle has underlined how the management is seeking to lift self-confidence at SAP, which has been hit by an erosion of employees’ and customers’ trust as well as business momentum during the past year.

The new spirit could be felt two weeks ago when the two co-heads staged VGP-BPS13/B Battery first summer party, attended by 23,500 employees and their families and featuring a show by one of Germany’s best-known circuses.

Mr McDermott said he was “very optimistic” about SAP’s growth prospects. “Wherever I speak to customers, I see big signs of growth. Exponential? No. But solid.”

He said there was a chance for SAP to exceed its full-year guidance for its software and related service revenues, which it recently lifted to 9 to 11 per cent.

“If western Europe has a steeper recovery . . . could things get better? Of battery they could. But right now we felt that this was the most realistic and appropriate thing to do,” he said.