SAP, in a super-heated market battle with arch-rivals Oracle and Software AG for market share in database, cloud middleware and application services, reported Jan. 10 that it significantly improved its financial numbers during the last year.
In a preliminary financial brief to selected media members prior to its fourth-quarter SEC earnings report on Jan. 21, the Walldorf, Germany-based company said its full-year IFRS (international financial reporting standards) software and cloud subscription revenue increased 10 percent to $7.2 billion.
Total software and software-related service revenue grew 11 percent to $19 billion.
Based on these figures and its projected sales, SAP’s growing cloud business now has an annual run rate of about $2.2 billion. The company also exceeded its full year 2013 guidance of $1.02 billion in cloud subscription and support revenue. SAP’s cloud business earned $466 million in 2012.
SAP HANA, an in-memory database for real-time applications, was a key growth factor for the company in 2013. HANA software revenue increased a whopping 69 percent in 2013 to $902 million.
“We are one of the few global tech companies that has successfully managed the transition to the cloud while growing our core business and improving our profitability at the same time,” co-CEOs Bill McDermott and Jim Hagemann Snabe said in a statement to the press.