SAP Named Top-Tier Software Vendor by APPS RUN THE WORLD in the APPS TOP 500 Market Report

SAP Strengths, Domain Expertise, and Key Differentiators

SAP maintains a dominant position in the enterprise software market, leading across key categories such as ERP, enterprise applications, and a wide array of management solutions. Its extensive portfolio spans 26 industries and 12 lines of business, offering flexible deployment models including cloud, on-premise, and hybrid configurations to meet the evolving needs of global organizations. Core platforms such as S/4HANA Cloud, RISE with SAP, and GROW with SAP enable seamless cloud adoption and digital modernization, while SAP’s Digital Supply Chain solutions promote operational efficiency, agility, and sustainability.

One of the latest developments lies in repositioning SAP Business Suite as the focal point through the elimination of stock keeping units and simplified pricing for SAP Cloud ERP. With the base pricing to buy a minimum of 25 seats, customers will be able to access both Cloud ERP financial management and supply chain management. The only consideration is whether they would like to cross-license procurement, HR and CX depending on their functional requirements. The new packaging strategy reaffirms the intrinsic value of its suite approach.

In addition to its foundational ERP capabilities, SAP delivers strong value through specialized solutions like SAP SuccessFactors for human capital management, SAP Concur for travel and expense management, and SAP Commerce Cloud (formerly Hybris) for omnichannel customer experiences. These offerings integrate deeply into SAP’s broader suite, supporting comprehensive business transformation across functions. The SAP Business Technology Platform (SAP BTP) serves as the technological backbone, providing cloud-native services for development, integration, data management, and analytics. With widespread adoption by thousands of customers and partners worldwide, SAP BTP plays a critical role in driving innovation, enabling enterprises to leverage real-time data and AI-driven insights for competitive advantage in a rapidly changing digital landscape.

SAP Recent Developments

SAP has significantly advanced its cloud-first strategy, with a strong emphasis on integrating artificial intelligence (AI) into its enterprise resource planning (ERP) solutions. The company reported robust cloud revenue growth, particularly for its Cloud ERP Suite, reflecting its ongoing transformation toward subscription-based models. Innovations like the SAP Knowledge Graph and the expansion of the Gen AI Hub, which supports AI use cases with models such as GPT-4 and Google Gemini, are enhancing SAP’s offerings. Additionally, the introduction of five line-of-business software bundles at SAP Sapphire 2024 aims to streamline migrations to S/4HANA, positioning SAP to meet evolving market demands for agile, AI-driven business solutions. Alongside this, SAP has launched its Business Data Cloud, powered through a strategic partnership with Databricks, offering unified access to SAP and third-party data and positioning the platform as a scalable foundation for business AI. The launch of SAP Databricks is designed to natively integrate the Databricks Data Intelligence Platform within the SAP Business Data Cloud. That allows customers to combine their SAP data with the rest of their enterprise data easily. Through bi-directional sharing of data via Delta Sharing between their SAP Databricks environment and their native Databricks (non-SAP) environment, they can unify all their data without complicated data engineering.

SAP’s Business AI portfolio is rapidly expanding its enterprise footprint, with over 34,000 cloud customers actively leveraging AI-driven capabilities. By the end of 2025, SAP is expected to offer more than 400 generative AI use cases, with over 200 already accessible across its product suite. The AI Foundation on SAP Business Technology Platform (BTP) has attracted engagement from more than 150 strategic partners, including technology providers, consultancies, and independent software vendors. SAP’s generative AI assistant, Joule, now powers 80% of the most-utilized tasks across its cloud applications, drawing on a library of over 1,600 AI skills. These advancements reflect SAP’s strong commitment to embedding intelligence at the core of enterprise processes through a collaborative and scalable AI ecosystem.

SAP Mergers and Acquisitions (M&A) Activities

SAP continues to refine its portfolio through strategic acquisitions aimed at boosting digital transformation and AI enablement. In June 2024, SAP completed the purchase of WalkMe, a digital adoption platform that supports users across both SAP and non‑SAP applications, reinforcing its value realization strategy. In 2023, it acquired LeanIX for enterprise architecture management and Signavio for business process management, moves that expand SAP’s transformation capabilities. These acquisitions underscore SAP’s strategy of merging operational tools with AI-driven intelligence.

In March 2022, SAP has completed the acquisition of Taulia, a provider of working capital management solutions. The acquisition further expands SAP’s business network and strengthens SAP’s solutions for the CFO office. Taulia’s solutions will both be tightly integrated into SAP software as well as continue to be available standalone. Taulia will operate as an independent company with its own brand within the SAP Group.

In March 2021, SAP acquired Signavio for enterprise business process intelligence and process management. The acquisition of Signavio complements SAP’s business process intelligence offerings and will help create new offerings by combining Signavio products and SAP products, but is also expected to result, for example, in increased SAP S/4HANA and RISE with SAP sales That followed the purchase of AppGyver for no-code development platform in February 2021. In 2020 SAP bought Emarsys for omnichannel customer engagement platform to complement its Customer Experience offerings. In July 2020, SAP announces spin off of Qualtrics and later In January 2021, Qualtrics went public after SAP spun it off by retaining majority ownership. The 2014 acquisition of Concur Technologies for $8.3 billion remains SAP’s largest, strengthening its position in expense management.

SAP Customers in ARTW Customer Database

Leveraging a rigorous data-centric research methodology, APPS RUN THE WORLD asks the simple question: Who’s buying SAP applications and why? And we provide the answers – supported by decades of research – to our clients around the world. Our Customer database has over 100 data fields that detail company usage of SAP and other enterprise apps by function, customer size, industry, location, implementation status, partner involvement, Line of Business Key Stakeholders and IT decision makers contact details. List of Verified SAP S/4HANA Cloud, RISE with SAP, GROW with SAP, SAP Signavio, SAP LeanIX, WalkMe, SAP Business Data Cloud, SAP SuccessFactors, SAP Business Network, SAP Ariba, SAP Concur, SAP Fieldglass, SAP CX, SAP Business Technology Platform (SAP BTP) customers.

SAP Key Enterprise and Cloud Applications

SAP S/4HANA Cloud, RISE with SAP, GROW with SAP, SAP Signavio, SAP LeanIX, WalkMe, SAP Business Data Cloud, SAP SuccessFactors, SAP Business Network, SAP Ariba, SAP Concur, SAP Fieldglass, SAP CX, SAP Business Technology Platform (SAP BTP)

SAP Revenues, $M:

SAP Revenue Breakdown By Type, $M:

SAP Enterprise Applications Revenues By Functional Markets, $M:

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SAP Revenues By Region, $M

SAP Direct vs Indirect sales

SAP Customers - Breakdown by Geo, Size, Vertical and Product

List of Verified SAP Customers

No. of SAP Customers: 450000

No. of SAP Enterprise Applications Customers: 450000

No. of SAP Cloud Customers: x

No. of SAP Cloud Subscribers: 300 million

The adoption of S/4HANA is thriving, with over 20,000 customers and continued growth, encompassing both existing and new ERP customers joining the SAP community. Furthermore, RISE with SAP facilitates the transition to the cloud journey with S/4HANA Cloud, marking nearly 4 years since its inception in January 2021. Remarkably, nearly 6000 customers have already embraced this offering.

In addition to GROW with SAP, the vendor also caters to the SME market with SAP Business One, which has more than 75,000 customers running it either as on-premise or hosted in the cloud, and SAP Business ByDesign, a Cloud ERP suite with about 14,000 customers.

There are now more than 10,000 organizations using SAP SuccessFactors solutions around the globe, including over 6,000 customers using the core HR solution, SAP SuccessFactors Employee Central. SAP still has more than 10,000 on-premise HCM applications customers, many of whom also run SAP Payroll on a global level. Another big bloc of customers lies in SAP Concur with more than 48,000 customers and 93 million users for travel and expense management. SAP reached over 23,000 live Business Technology Platform implementations, the evolving solution that aims to connect all assets of SAP by mitigating expensive integration costs for such capabilities as embedded business intelligence/data warehouse, process orchestration and low-code development with new products like Datasphere, Signavio and SAP Build.

SAP Market Opportunities, M&A and Geo Expansions

The near term target is for SAP to spur the adoption of SAP Business Suite through a simplified packaging, while compressing time to market with its Activate implementation methodology. Activate, which leverages a fair amount of templates that have been proven in its RISE offerings, will be expanded to cover all SAP Business Suite products. On the other hand, RISE will be geared toward SAP Cloud ERP Private Editions for those that require more special handling because of their industry and data residency requirements.

The current expectation is that by 2027, SAP will successfully migrate 90% of its existing ERP customer base, encompassing a total of 20,000 accounts and 48,000 systems, to SAP Business Suite encompassing S/4HANA as the core platform for these organizations. Additionally, SAP aims to further expand its market presence by transitioning a significant portion of its 20,000 S/4HANA on-premise and 15,000 to 20,000 ECC customers to the cloud. The company has also experienced a steady influx of new customers adopting SAP Cloud ERP through RISE for Private Cloud deployment, with hundreds of net new customers joining each year. Furthermore, SAP's recent launch of SAP GROW for the midmarket has bolstered sales of SAP Cloud ERP Suite, with approximately 700 GROW customers signed since March 2023.

The lucrative SMB software opportunity – where 79% of the addressable space is at stake – is also beginning to favor SAP after experiencing exceptional growth by signing nearly 100,000 ERP customers in a huge market segment representing tens of millions of organizations between 10 and 999 employees in 2025 as the vendor faces off against stiff competition from the likes of Infor, Intuit, Microsoft Dynamics, Oracle NetSuite, and Sage.

SAP Risks and Challenges

The biggest challenge for SAP is to retake the No. 1 ERP market leader position. As recent as early 2020, Christian Klein, who was co-CEO at the time until he was named the sole chief executive of SAP in April of that year, saw little threat from Oracle ever becoming the No. 1 ERP vendor despite the fact some of its customers were entertaining the idea of containing their spend with SAP because of structural changes to the economy with more emphasis on services than goods and their move to the Cloud.

Soon a storm of controversy erupted over customer defection in dueling earnings calls from the two vendors with some citing SAP ERP customers migrating to Oracle while others reporting Oracle database workloads being moved to SAP HANA. According to our Buyer Insight Technographics Database, there have been cases where a number of SAP customers have replaced their ERP systems with Oracle products either at the divisional level or wholesale changes following an extended period of running old versions of SAP. However, these are exceptions rather than the rule, meaning that SAP’s account control remains firmly in place.

The real catalyst behind the latest turn of events is simple math. SAP’s installed base now covers no more than 400,000 customers, compared with about 400,000 for Oracle.

In its latest fiscal year, SAP was able to fetch on average $91,800 in revenue per customer for a total turnover of $37 billion, compared with $132,500 for Oracle for a total turnover of $53 billion, handing Oracle a 31% wallet-share advantage. That means Oracle is capable of selling more products to its customers, many of whom are willing to pay more for their end-to-end Oracle products and services including the mission-critical ERP systems.

SAP's new simplified packaging is expected to address by offering more value and less hassle for customers wanting to adopt a full range of modular capabilities without adding them one at a time.

PepsiCo is a good case study on how a multinational that has been running a slew of legacy products from SAP for a long time, now standardizing on S/4HANA financial management and procurement across multiple business units like distribution and Frito-Lays. With a plain vanilla implementation, PepsiCo was able to implement financial management and procurement at the same time, an unheard of rollout that could not have happened under the old SAP piece-meal formula.

SAP Ecosystem, Partners, Resellers and SI

Partners have played a pivotal role in SAP's journey since its inception in 1972. Over the years, SAP has placed greater emphasis on its partner ecosystem, particularly as it prioritizes cloud industries and aims to deliver top-notch solutions to enhance customer outcomes. In today's landscape, where enterprises are transitioning to cloud-based ERP systems, undergoing constant business transformations, and embracing cutting-edge technologies like artificial intelligence (AI), SAP's partner ecosystem assumes a crucial role. Comprising over 25,800 delivering around 90 percent of SAP customer implementations. SAP's ecosystem encompasses entities that specialize in building, selling, servicing, and operating SAP solutions and technology.

SAP collaborates with an array of prominent partners, including Accenture, Atos, Bain and Company, BCG, Capgemini, Cognizant, Deloitte, DXC Technology, EY, Fujitsu, HCL, IBM, Alibaba, Amazon Web Services (AWS), Microsoft, Infosys, LTI, McKinsey, Minsait – An Indra Company, NTT Data, PwC, TCS, Tech Mahindra, T-Systems, Wipro and Kearney.

Research Methodology

Data used in research reports are derived from publicly available documents, continuous surveys of applications vendors, customers, resellers, Independent Software Vendors, systems integrators and other verifiable sources.

Vendor shares and market forecast results are based on a combination of existing databases as well as demand side and supply side research conducted throughout the year with validation from vendors, customers, channel partners and documentations such as earnings releases and 10Q and 10K filings, vertical industry studies, regional and country-level statistics from public and private institutions(i.e. colleges, universities, government agencies and trade associations).

For additional information on our methodologies, here's the link: