SAP SE (SAP) operates as a leader in enterprise applications software, enterprise resource management applications, supply chain management applications, procurement applications software, travel and expense management software, and enterprise resource planning software worldwide.
Business Model
The company creates value by first identifying the business needs of its customers and then developing and delivering a portfolio of cloud solutions, services, and support that address these needs. The...
SAP SE (SAP) operates as a leader in enterprise applications software, enterprise resource management applications, supply chain management applications, procurement applications software, travel and expense management software, and enterprise resource planning software worldwide.
Business Model
The company creates value by first identifying the business needs of its customers and then developing and delivering a portfolio of cloud solutions, services, and support that address these needs. The company strives to continuously improve its solutions, identify further business needs, and deliver enhanced value to its customers.
The company derives revenue from fees charged to its customers for subscriptions to use its cloud solutions. Software licenses, on-premise support, consulting, development, training, and other services also contribute significant revenue.
Subsidiaries, Acquisitions, and Joint Ventures
Subsidiaries
SAP is the ultimate parent company of the SAP Group. As of December 31, 2024, the SAP Group consisted of 226 companies.
Material Acquisitions
The company continues to focus on organic investments in technology and innovations that should ensure sustainable growth of its product portfolio.
On June 5, 2024, SAP announced its intent to acquire 100% of WalkMe Ltd. (WalkMe), a leader in digital adoption platforms (DAPs). The transaction closed on September 12, 2024, following satisfaction of regulatory and other approvals.
Sapphire Ventures
In addition to the company’s investments in organic growth and acquisitions, SAP also supports entrepreneurs who aspire to build industry-leading businesses through venture capital funds managed by Sapphire Ventures. Sapphire Ventures manages more than US$10 billion (over €9 billion) and has invested in more than 200 companies. It places a particular focus on companies and venture funds in Europe, Israel, the United Kingdom, and the United States.
Product Strategy
The recently launched SAP Business Suite leverages the powerful combination of these three components. It offers a comprehensive set of integrated solutions, combining its core cloud ERP and line-of-business (LoB) applications to seamlessly connect functions across the business end to end. An integral part of this offering is SAP Business Technology Platform (SAP BTP), ensuring harmonized data and seamless process flows across SAP and non-SAP systems. Driven by business data and artificial intelligence (AI), the company’s strategy emphasizes a modular, composable design, addressing critical business processes while offering flexibility and scalability. The Cloud ERP Suite metric is the subset of SAP Business Suite that includes the company’s strategic cloud solutions, which are most of the solutions in SAP Business Suite.
The company’s strategy also entails being data-focused. With the company’s applications covering a vast array of business processes and, crucially, their data, it intends to harmonize its semantic model so that its customers can benefit from highly valuable insights, enriched by AI.
For the company’s cloud products, Suite-First describes its objective of delivering a consistent, or suite-like, experience across its portfolio. In the company’s user interface based on a modern design system, Suite-First aims to ensure faster time to value for customers; in its extensibility approach for SAP BTP, it helps its customers extend and enhance its applications; and in product localization, it is central to helping customers operate in different geographies while ensuring compliance with local regulations.
SAP strives to help customers grow their businesses profitably, while at the same time minimizing the risks. To this end, SAP has two journeys, RISE with SAP and GROW with SAP, which cater to different customer objectives and requirements.
RISE with SAP is targeted at the company’s installed base customers and helps them on their journey from legacy ERP systems to the SAP Business Suite.
GROW with SAP is targeted at new ERP customers and comprises an ERP software-as-a-service (SaaS) suite of solutions that aims to help customers grow their businesses and simplify work processes.
The pillars of SAP’s product strategy, and the company’s development and innovations, are presented below.
SAP Business AI
SAP Business AI capabilities are available across SAP’s suite of enterprise applications and SAP BTP and are grounded in customers’ own business data. SAP offers a range of AI-powered use cases built into core business processes across cloud ERP and finance, supply chain, procurement, human resources (HR), sales, marketing and commerce, as well as in IT and across industries, which are used by more than 30,000 customers.
By using these embedded AI capabilities, customers can benefit from immediate business value through increased automation, leading to more productivity. And by using Joule, SAP’s AI copilot, users can interact with enterprise software in natural language, while AI agents are able to take over complex tasks that span the enterprise. In addition, partners and customers can build custom or extend existing AI capabilities based on a comprehensive set of SAP AI Services in AI Foundation on SAP BTP.
Cloud ERP
SAP S/4HANA Cloud provides software capabilities mainly for finance, risk management, project management, procurement, manufacturing, supply chain management, asset management, and R&D. This also includes platform capabilities, such as the SAP HANA in-memory database, data management, AI, and application lifecycle management, as well as SAP cloud ERP solutions, which its customers consume as part of their transformation to the cloud. These cloud ERP solutions help customers adopt new business models, such as subscription-based services, by using AI, machine learning, and other intelligent technologies for enhanced data analytics and automation.
Human Capital Management
SAP SuccessFactors solutions aim to optimize the relationship between employees and employers, and empower organizations to create an agile, future-ready workforce in a rapidly changing workplace. The portfolio includes an AI-enabled suite of cloud solutions spanning core HR, time, payroll, and talent management, analytics and planning, and employee experience management.
Spend Management
SAP’s spend management solutions aim to provide a more unified view of a customer’s spending to help reduce costs, mitigate risks, improve collaboration, and align spend decisions with business strategy. They cover direct and indirect spend, travel and expenses, and external workforce management. The company’s SAP Ariba solutions combine industry-leading cloud-based applications to help companies discover and collaborate with a global network of partners. The company’s SAP Concur solutions portfolio contains world-leading solutions for integrated travel, expense, and invoice management. SAP Fieldglass solutions help businesses find, engage, and manage their global external workforce.
Customer Experience
SAP Customer Experience solutions help businesses create customer journeys that aim to boost loyalty and drive sustainable growth. Integrated with SAP S/4HANA, SAP S/4HANA Cloud, and other SAP ERP systems, this portfolio offers solutions with embedded AI for customer engagement, commerce, sales, service, and data management.
SAP Business Technology Platform
SAP Business Technology Platform (SAP BTP) is its business-centric open platform. Consisting of market-leading technologies infused with AI, it enables SAP development, customers, and its partner ecosystem to unlock innovation across the enterprise. SAP BTP enables customers and partners to build, integrate, and automate applications while leveraging insights from business data on a trusted enterprise-grade environment.
Key capabilities of SAP BTP include: SAP Build and SAP Build Code tools, ABAP Cloud development model, which provides an intuitive, modern development environment for IT and citizen developers; SAP HANA Cloud, SAP Datasphere, and SAP Analytics Cloud solutions, which offer database, data management, analysis, and planning capabilities that utilize the value of data; SAP Integration Suite, an integration platform as a service (iPaaS) and management capabilities for Application Programming Interfaces (APIs) to connect and automate business processes; and AI Foundation on SAP BTP, which has a rich toolset, including access to a broad range of large language models (LLMs) from third-party providers and vector database capabilities to enable developers to create AI-powered and generative-AI-powered extensions and applications.
Industry Solutions
The company’s industry solutions aim to differentiate its RISE with SAP and GROW with SAP offerings by providing customers and partners with industry-specific innovations that extend SAP’s core offering. These innovations leverage SAP Business AI to create tailored and intelligent solutions that customers can use to meet their unique industry-specific needs.
SAP Business Network
SAP Business Network is a business-to-business collaboration platform trusted by companies in 190 countries. The network helps digitalize key business processes across the supply chain and enables communication between trading partners beyond the four walls of an organization. This enables buyers and suppliers to find each other and execute end-to-end transactions, and helps businesses be transparent, resilient, and sustainable.
Business Transformation Management
SAP’s business transformation management solutions help customers realize holistic data-driven business transformation across several pillars: With SAP Signavio solutions, organizations can analyze, discover, and understand their business process operations. By benchmarking current process landscapes against best practices and acting on change recommendations, customers can define a target state and adapt as-is processes accordingly, while measuring whether realized outcomes match strategic goals.
With SAP LeanIX solutions, customers can visualize their as-is enterprise architecture, assess interdependencies and the potential impact of IT modernization, and manage the transition toward the target landscape with established best practices and a detailed roadmap.
WalkMe solutions can help organizations navigate constant technology change by providing users with advanced guidance and automation features that enable them to execute workflows seamlessly across any number of applications. In addition, the SAP Enable Now solution provides e-learning content embedded in SAP workflows. Combined, SAP Enable Now and WalkMe will offer customers a comprehensive learning and digital adoption solution to improve the adoption of cloud solutions from SAP and drive faster value realization.
Working Capital Management
The SAP Taulia portfolio provides tools and expertise to help businesses create and deliver the right cash flow strategy, and the flexibility to adjust it to meet evolving liquidity challenges. The SAP Taulia Cash Flow Acceleration platform is designed to help optimize cash flow while ensuring supply chain health and resilience. SAP Taulia solutions also embed sustainability functions into core processes, providing financial incentives to encourage the supply base to improve its ESG (environmental, social, and governance) credentials.
Sustainability Management
SAP offers sustainability solutions and services that help customers drive sustainable practices not only inside their organization but across the entire value chain. SAP Sustainability is an ERP-centric, cloud-based, AI-enabled solutions portfolio that supports companies with ESG reporting and management, carbon management, material transition, and operational compliance. It integrates robust, auditable sustainability data into core processes to improve ESG transparency and sustainable business performance. The portfolio includes the following offerings: SAP Sustainability Control Tower, SAP Sustainability Footprint Management, SAP Sustainability Data Exchange, and SAP Green Ledger, which became generally available in December 2024. SAP Green Ledger integrates sustainability data directly with customers’ financial data. This allows customers to use actual verified and reported data to allocate carbon emissions to specific products, services, organizational units, and business transactions.
Partners and Ecosystem
The company’s worldwide ecosystem of more than 25,000 partners delivers not only services and support for its customers but also partner innovations that extend its solutions and are built ideally on SAP BTP.
Services and Support
The company continues to evolve its cloud-focused services and support portfolio to focus on customer adoption and consumption.
Central to the Services and Support portfolio is SAP Enterprise Support, which provides foundational tools and services, curated content, and mission-critical support. SAP Enterprise Support, cloud editions are included with cloud solution subscriptions. If customers require more guidance from SAP, they can opt for incremental service plans, such as SAP Preferred Success and SAP Cloud Application Services, as well as professional services to address project-specific objectives, timelines, and plans.
To help customers who intend to make an enterprise-wide transformational change, SAP offers SAP MaxAttention and SAP ActiveAttention services for tailored, long-term strategic engagement. Learning and user enablement is available throughout a customer’s journey and ranges from role-based digital content to expert-led live sessions, hands-on practical training, custom learning content, and certification.
Customers
Focusing on Customer Success
The company aims to maximize the value its customers derive from their investment in, and relationship with, SAP. It does so at every touchpoint in their experience with it over the entire engagement lifecycle. The company’s customer-facing teams – across solutions, sales, services, customer engagement, ecosystem, and others – work together along an operating model that aims to harmonize internal processes with the goal of delivering improved outcomes for its customers. Their feedback is crucial for its journey together.
To further address and improve customer feedback, the company has a Company-Wide Global Experience Management (XM) Program in place. This program aims to achieve a consistent end-to-end experience for the company’s customers by standardizing experience initiatives and methodologies to help identify and close experience gaps across SAP. The head of Competitive Market Intelligence (CMI) in the Office of the CEO leads its Global XM Program, which includes conducting the Customer Net Promoter Score (NPS) survey. The company’s Customer NPS is a KPI in the short-term incentive component of Executive Board remuneration.
Policies such as the company’s Global Code of Ethics and Business Conduct for Employees and applicable General Terms and Conditions for its products govern its relationships with its customers.
Patents
The company’s investment in R&D has resulted in numerous patents. As of December 31, 2024, SAP held in excess of 13,000 validated patents worldwide. Of these, more than 700 were granted and validated in 2024.
Seasonality
The company’s business has historically experienced the highest revenue in the fourth quarter of each year, primarily due to year-end capital purchases by customers. Such factors have resulted in 2024 first-quarter revenue being lower than revenue in the prior year’s fourth quarter (year ended December 31, 2024).
History
SAP SE was founded in 1972.