SAP Breaks Records In Q2, Fires Up SMB BI Partners

August 6, 2012 Timothy Prickett Morgan

As expected, German software giant SAP turned in the best second quarter in its long history, with sales rising 18 percent to €3.9bn and profits after taxes up 12 percent to €661 million. The company has also announced a new program to help BI partners to peddled SAP’s wares into the SMB space.

In the quarter ended in June, SAP’s software license revenues grew by 26 percent, to €1.06 billion, while support revenues rose by 16 percent to €2.01 billion. Consulting revenues were up 7 percent, to €617 million, while other services rose 11 percent to €157 million. Cloud and subscription revenues rose by a factor of 13X thanks mostly to the acquisition of SuccessFactors, a human capital management vendor that SAP shelled out $3.4 billion to acquire back in December 2011.

What we now know is that SAP had a piddling cloud subscription and support business, at €4 million in the second quarter of 2011, and that the €52 million it got after the SuccessFactors deal is still utterly dwarfed by traditional on-premise software license and support contracts. SAP said that SuccessFactors all by itself grew by 112 percent in the quarter, and the pending $4.3 billion acquisition of Ariba, which sells a cloud-based commerce software service, will similarly boost the cloud biz at the German company when it closes. That deal was announced in May and is expected to close this quarter.

SAP said that its HANA in-memory appliance software for lightning-fast analytics brought in €85 million in revenues in Q2, putting the company on tract for at least €320 million in HANA sales and well above the €220 million it was expected as 2011 came to a close.

In a separate announcement, SAP said that it was expanding its PartnerEdge program to help partners peddling SAP wares to small and medium businesses sell BusinessObjects BI tools. Up until now, SAP has only peddled its Crystal Reports, which was passed around a few different companies until it was acquired by BusinessObjects in 2003. SAP, of course, acquired BusinessObjects in 2007 just before the economy went south. The program SMB BusinessObjects reseller program was launched in the Asia/Pacific region and will be made available in a phased approach to local distributors and their downstream resellers “in a phased approach.” Resellers don’t have to pay fees and get SAP education relating to BusinessObjects BI tools for free, as well as access to online marketing tools.