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Bill McDermott made one thing very clear in SAP's third-quarter earnings call this morning: SAP is better than everyone else.
Better than Oracle. Better than Salesforce. Better than Workday. Even better than Facebook, Ikea, Amazon, eBay and Alibaba.
The CEO's confidence is based on SAP's progress in the cloud, which he said allows businesses run their entire production engines. Competitors merely offer "point solutions," he claimed.
The Walldorf, Germany-based software giant saw cloud revenues climb 41 percent this quarter year-over-year, and its customer count in its business suite on HANA jumped from 450 to 1,450 this quarter in the same period.
Never missing an opportunity to cite a competitor's inferiority, McDermott said that's "more than Workday's total number of customers."
Hail HANA
SAP is hot off the heels of its announcement that it joined forces with fellow enterprise software giant IBM. SAP announced its 4,100-customer HANA Enterprise Cloud service is now available through IBM’s cloud in a move officials from each company claim expands major markets with the addition of the IBM cloud data centers.
IBM could use the boost. IBM reported disappointing results in its own earnings call today.
But McDermott is still happy with IBM. He called SAP-IBM a "bold partnership" that combines the benefits of the HANA Enterprise Cloud with "IBM's highly scalable, open and secure cloud data centers across the world."
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McDermott later specifically called out Oracle on growth in the cloud. He said Oracle's growth pales in comparison to SAP's. SAP's third-quarter cloud revenue was about $356 million. Yearly, SAP has a $1.7 billion cloud business.
McDermott also gloated over SAP's customer engagement and omnichannel e-commerce platform capabilities through hybris, citing triple-digit growth in software revenue and cloud subscriptions and support revenue.
No Salesforce Fan
He said hybris is now a Gartner Magic Quadrant digital commerce leader ahead of Oracle and IBM for the first time. In the latest public MQ -- spring 2013 -- Oracle, IBM and hybris were leaders, before SAP acquired hybris. SAP was a challenger then.
McDermott also called out Salesforce, saying, "No CEO I speak with is interested in Salesforce automation solutions to solve yesterday's administrative challenges. They're hungry for growth and only SAP solutions for customer engagement and commerce can deliver."
Topline growth for SAP, meanwhile, hit 7 percent in software and software-related service revenue. Year-to-date software and software-related service revenue is up 8 percent.
