Good morning, good afternoon, and good evening. Hello, everyone. I am Oliver Roll, SAP's Chief Communications Officer, and we're so happy that you've joined us today for our press conference. I know that you're in different parts of the world. Some of you have got up early, some of you are staying up late. For some of you, it's the middle of the day. Many of you have joined us for many years in a row. This is the second time that we're virtual, and we really do hope that a year from now, we'll have some of you back here in Walldorf, as you've been coming for many years previously. In a moment, we're gonna introduce Christian Klein, our CEO, and Luka Mucic, our CFO.
Obviously today we announced our earnings for Q4 and also the full year. We also announced an intended acquisition of Taulia. After Luka and Christian have made their comments, we'll be opening up to you for questions. If I could just say a couple of things about the session. The session is being recorded. Secondly, all growth figures that we mention are non-IFRS at constant currency. You have access to a question tool. You can ask and pose a question at any time. If you do have a question, we'd really appreciate it if you could write your name and also the title that you represent, and also please ask your question in English. We will be prioritizing those questions that include those details. With that, let me hand over to Christian Klein, SAP's CEO.
Christian, welcome.
Yeah. Thank you, Oliver Roll. Thanks to all of you for joining today to our press conference. Again, virtual. Let's hope for all of us that 2022 is the year where we can come back to meet and see each other in person. Exactly one year ago in this press conference, we talked about three main points. Our new strategy, our new RISE with SAP offering, and the new Executive Board composition. Today, I can say what a difference a year can make. SAP accelerated significantly the growth in the cloud far above expectations. RISE with SAP is in the meantime a blockbuster success, and I'm really happy about the strong mindset and teamwork within the SAP Executive Board and across SAP. Let me start with the financial results, as these numbers tell the story best.
Just a year ago, we changed our strategy, and as a consequence, our financial guidance, with a strong focus on cloud growth. Here we go. Current cloud backlog of nearly EUR 9.5 billion, a strong indicator for future revenue growth, increased by 4 percentage points to 26% in only three months. Representing an increase of 12 percentage points year-over-year. Our cloud revenue increased by 24% year-over-year. Just to remind everyone, both cloud metrics are already now ahead of our midterm growth objective of 22%. One thing for sure, SAP will further accelerate cloud growth in 2022. Last but not least, S/4HANA Cloud revenue increased by 61% year-over-year in Q4. There is no other cloud ERP growing with a similar pace, not even close, and we are gaining massive market share.
Finally, every single cloud product delivered double-digit growth in Q4. Our revenue run rate for the modular cloud ERP now approaches EUR 7 billion, up from EUR 6 billion at the beginning of the year. As you can see on this slide, in Q4 again, many large enterprises across the world decided to transform their business with SAP. Customers like Siemens, Enel, Fresenius are adapting to new business models with our technology to accelerate growth. As another example, Schneider Electric is moving ahead with SAP to transform their manufacturing supply chain business with S/4HANA Cloud and our IoT-enabled supply chain portfolio. IBM is in the middle of a transformation with divestitures while launching new areas for future growth. Again, this change is enabled by S/4HANA Cloud. Many other large flagship customers from all industries selected SAP in Q4 to manage their transformation.
What do all of these customers have in common? In order to be competitive, they need more than just a technical migration to the cloud. The hardest part in a transformation is not just to implement new technology. It is actually to change long-standing business models and drive business process standardization. All these customers discovered RISE as a unique offering, which allows them to perform a holistic business transformation. RISE is a journey where SAP gets even closer to our customers to deliver on three key benefits. First, business process redesign. Here, we continuously analyze and benchmark the business processes against best practices from over 400,000 customers. These insights set our customers up to adapt to new digital business models and drive process automation. Second, it's about a cloud migration.
Our ambition with RISE is not just a technical move of the existing landscape. Let's get rid of the complexity in the existing landscape, the modifications, and move to a modular and integrated ERP in the public cloud. Let's make sure the customer can consume future upgrades to new releases at a much faster pace. Third, it's about innovation. We help the customer to connect and consume new innovations from SAP for their industry. We enable them to build resilient supply chains in our business network. Why does SAP see this strong growth momentum? Why is actually our portfolio more relevant than ever? Actually, because our over 30,000 engineers at SAP are focused to deliver innovation to solve the biggest challenges of our customers. First, it's about a business model transformation, as I just mentioned.
No matter if it's in retail, our customers move with our solutions to personalized offerings, to resilient supply chain. No matter if it's in utilities, where Enel and others are focusing now on green energy, and they need software, they need technology to drive this adoption to this change in their business. If it's about a chemical industry, which we are enabling to drive sustainability going forward. Second, 2021 was a year of many supply chain shocks, many supply chain disruptions. Actually the outlook is that also in 2022, a lot of raw materials will be short. We saw a huge surge in the last year and in the years to come in our SAP Business Network that more and more suppliers, manufacturers, logistics providers are joining the world's largest business network.
We have with Catena-X a perfect example and to see how it can work to really provide this real-time transparency across the supply chain, from the car manufacturer down to the raw material provider to track and trace real-time the supply chain. Last but not least, it's about sustainability. What is unique to SAP, and I will come later to that, is that we are making sustainability transparent. We are measuring, for example, the carbon in the supply chain, in the manufacturing, not only within an enterprise, but we are really , targeting to measure the carbon across, again, the whole supply chain. To wrap it up, we enable our customers with RISE to transform into intelligent network and sustainable enterprise. We are convinced a strong top and bottom line performance is no reason why an enterprise can also not deliver a strong green line performance.
Besides our very strong organic innovations, we are always looking to enhance our portfolio to drive even better outcomes for our customers. This week, we released two big announcements. First, this morning, we announced our intent to acquire Taulia, a market-leading fintech company focused on working capital management and supply chain finance. Taulia will be actually a great addition to our business network and procurement portfolio. Why? These SAP solutions generate billions of transactions. With Taulia, we will enable our customers to finance these transactions and improve significantly their cash flow. Not to forget, earlier this week, we also announced an investment, an enhanced partnership with Icertis, a leading provider for intelligent contract management solution. Again, Icertis is a great and seamless complement to our portfolio, as Icertis has multiple touch points to SAP systems in the ERP, in procurement, in sales and HR.
One of the most important indicators for the success of our transformation is actually the success of our customers. Again, as you can see on the slide, customer satisfaction is up by 6 percentage points in 2021. It hit an all-time high in the most recent survey. Rest assured, we are not leaving one single customer behind in the pandemic. We care, especially in the crisis. For example, we also didn't increase the support fees during the pandemic. For me, very important, we're also keeping our promise. We said we are focusing on inorganic innovation, and we deliver. For example, 73 new solutions as part of the Industry Cloud, tightly integrated into the core of SAP. We launched RISE with SAP. Finally, we also increased the transactions in the business network and as well the participants. Second, we kept our promise on integration.
Only in 2021, we delivered about 400 new integration scenarios for total workforce management, for procure-to-pay, for lead-to-cash. Our business technology platform, in the meantime, serves for our customers and partners as a foundation where they can find one harmonized domain model for all of SAP, but also for all apps in our ecosystem. We also harmonize the security layer again across our portfolio. Third, we of course also continuing with our own transformation. We revamped our incentives to focus even more on customer satisfaction, time to value and renew. We, of course, also focusing on attracting and retaining the top talents for SAP. We did multiple efforts with regard to university engagement. We actually invested heavily in continuous learning and also for training programs within SAP.
One topic is really near to my heart, and it also is reflected in the vision of SAP. Help the world run better and improve people's lives. Motivated by our role to help the world run better and improving people's life, climate change is actually an imperative for businesses today. As I mentioned earlier, SAP has its own very ambitious sustainability objectives, but we go one step ahead. We actually wanna enable our customers to become more sustainable enterprises. Just recently, we launched SAP Cloud for Sustainable Enterprises. What do we do there? Today, nine out of 10 warehouses, supply chain manufacturing is run by SAP. Past 50 years, we managed productivity. We gave transparency on the cost of goods sold. Now, we expanded our data model to measure ESG to really give our customers the transparency to act on sustainability.
On top, we also launched more solutions. For example, in the procurement area to move into the circular economy so that you can make conscious decisions around, you know, which supplier is the best from a cost, from quality, but also from a sustainability perspective. At the end, I don't want to miss the opportunity to thank our over 100,000 employees. They did an excellent job in 2021 to keep our over 400,000 customers and partners running and innovating at a faster pace than ever before. 2021 was a record year for SAP, and this is just the beginning. We are very confident about the future and our long-term ambition. We are clearly ahead of our plan. Now, I would like to hand over to Luka. Luka?
Yeah. Thank you very much, Christian, and also from my side, hello, everybody, and a happy and healthy new year, 2022, to everyone. Yeah, let me start by saying that I'm likewise very proud of what we have achieved in 2021. First of all, we have proven out that our revised strategy works and that it drives sustainable growth for the company. Very importantly for me as well from a CFO perspective, we kept our promise. We have raised our guidance both for the combined top line of cloud and software revenues, as well as for operating profit, multiple times during the year. We did actually the same on the cloud revenue front, and we actually beat this guidance and came in at the very high end for cloud revenues, nevertheless.
As Christian has said, I want to just amplify the point that RISE with SAP was really a stellar success and contributed greatly to those results, not only through the fact that we saw an adoption by more than 1,300 customers, which is significantly ahead of the expectation for around about 1,000 customers that we had at the beginning of the year, but more importantly, because we are seeing now more and more of the largest of our customers adopting the offering. You can see this actually in the fact that the share of large cloud orders above the EUR 5 million mark, as a percentage of our total cloud order entry, moved up significantly to close to 50% in Q4 last year, versus just 31% in Q4 2020.
The likes of CVS and IBM in the U.S., Fresenius, Siemens, Allianz in Germany, Panasonic and Standard Chartered Bank in Asia, are just examples for what we are beginning to see, and we will further expand on this, for sure in 2022. Now, Christian has also already covered broadly the cloud momentum that we're seeing. I just want to give you as an additional data point in reference, the fact that our SaaS PaaS cloud revenue outside our Intelligent Spend Group actually grew by 33% in Q4 2021, which is hardly matched by any other scaled cloud vendor that you see out there in the market. All major solutions, as Christian said, including actually our Intelligent Spend Group, grew in double digits in Q4.
I'm also glad to see that the performance that we had across the board was very healthy and very consistent across all of our regions, all of our major geographies, and the momentum build up that we have seen in increasing growth rates through the different quarters was actually shared by all of our major geographies. Let me spend a few words on our bottom line performance, because I know that this is a point that is very carefully eyed by the media and the capital markets. First of all, our total gross margin at the company level was actually up a very nice 70 basis points to 74%. We had improvements in our software and support, as well as in our services margin.
Conversely, our cloud gross margin was slightly down in 2021, due to significant investments that we are doing in our Next-Generation Cloud Delivery program, and also due to the fact that our high margin cloud business in Concur was still dampened through the pandemic conditions for the bigger part of 2021. That being said, the investments we are taking as part of the Next-Generation Cloud Delivery program are setting us up to, as of 2023, drive for a significantly higher cloud margin, which will also propel the contribution of our cloud business to our profits. This is an investment that is more than worthwhile to make.
On the IFRS front, our profits and margins were down due to the impact of share-based compensation, in particular, from the Qualtrics IPO, and also the increase of the SAP share price during the year. However, on the non-IFRS front, we actually beat our guidance and showed positive growth, 1% growth in operating profit. That was ahead of the outlook for 2021 and 2022 that we gave when we released our refreshed strategy of flat to slightly declining profits. We are ahead of our plan. Still despite of that, as you will see when we cover the outlook for 2022, we're actually confirming on that higher basis, the flat to slightly declining profit expectation for 2022.
Let me come quickly to the true bottom line, to our earnings per share performance, which was really decent in 2021. We saw a 3% increase in our IFRS EPS and a significant 25% increase in our non-IFRS earnings per share. That was supported by a strong performance of our Sapphire Ventures venture capital fund all the way through 2021, as well as a reduced tax rate. We also had a strong performance on the cash flow side. It was actually the second-best performance on record after 2020, which was outstanding in all respects. We came in ahead of our guidance for 2021, which was for free cash flow to land above EUR 4.5 billion. We ended up with slightly more than EUR 5 billion.
Our guidance for 2022 is the same, to land above EUR 4.5 billion. If we again end up at the high end of our operating profit guidance, that is absolutely in reach as well. Let me, with that, come to the forward-looking view of the world, which is, I think even more important than taking a look at the achievements of the past, and cover our business outlook for 2022. As Christian has said, we are extremely confident in our short-term prospects on the back of a very significant surge in current cloud backlog to 26% growth in Q4. We believe that we will sustain these growth rates through 2022.
As a result of this, we also are absolutely confident that our cloud revenue growth will continue to accelerate. At the high end, our cloud revenue guidance calls for up to 26% growth in 2022. In 2022, we are at an inflection point as we believe that we have scope to accelerate our cloud growth even beyond 2022. At the same time, we are now seeing the advent of the decisive turning point of our strategy transformation that we had outlined one year ago.
That is that as of 2023, the surge in cloud growth, as well as the success of our overarching transformation, will actually lead us to double-digit growth, first for operating profit and then closely followed, by total revenue growth in the double digits as well. Again, we expect a further acceleration, on those metrics beyond 2023. At the same time, our total business portfolio will become way more resilient, because we will drive, for a, highly predictable revenue share of 85% of our total revenues by 2025. That means more than 30 billion of our revenues, will be highly predictable, sticky, recurring revenue sources with a very high gross margin, as I should add.
Let me talk a little bit about why we are so confident in our momentum and why we believe that our business transformation is extremely powerful and will yield far higher returns for all of our stakeholders as we progress further. First of all, it's important to note that in 2021, we actually drove for a significantly higher total cloud order entry, meaning for multiple year contracts, a much higher share of contracts with a ramp, in many cases, a significant ramp in later years. You are not seeing this in our annualized values, and you're also not seeing it therefore fully in our current cloud backlog. It is there. We know that it will fuel the backlog in 2022 and also in later years.
This means two very important, fundamentally significant things. First of all, we have a greatly increased visibility in our performance, which makes us so confident to guide for the significant surge in cloud revenues for 2022. We actually also have now a much better line of sight into our midterm ambitions. Secondly, we don't have to drive only for net new business to further propel our backlog and our cloud revenues up because the share of already existing contracts that are contributing to revenues is increasing, and is already fueled by the significantly higher total cloud order entry growth. As a result of that, we are so confident about the acceleration of our business, even defying the otherwise applicable law of reducing growth rates over time.
The other important point that is connected to this closely is that in 2023, our Next-Generation Cloud Delivery program will have run its course. Not only will we not have the related project costs anymore, which by the way in 2021 have affected the cloud margin by close to 1 percentage point, but on top of it, we will have a much more resilient and much more efficient and elastic and harmonized cloud infrastructure that will allow us to drive for significantly higher gross margins in the cloud. This is one of the key sources of the return to double-digit growth and actually accelerating double-digit growth because the cloud business is becoming a more and more bigger part of our overarching business.
Second, the share of our sales expenses relative to revenues will also start to trend down, in particular for the years after 2023, because again, increasing part of our cloud revenues will be from existing contracts, for which, we don't have, a similar, amount of sales related expenses in our customer success organization, as, for net new contracts. There is a lot, to be excited about in terms of our midterm prospects. Of course, as Christian has said, results on the top line and the bottom line are not everything. We also continue to care about our sustainability performance. We have always been a leader, in this space and, we are very much looking forward to sharing our performance, in our tenth integrated report already on March the 3rd.
Just one case in point, we continue to drive down our own carbon emissions, and we are well on plan to come to carbon neutral operations in our own operations by 2023. Christian has already talked about our commitment to actually go even further and drive for net zero emissions across our entire value chain, 20 years earlier than already planned before. Let me conclude. 2021 was a year of great execution against our strategy. Our cloud order entry was extremely strong. Our renewal rates, the health of our cloud business has improved greatly. We are extremely confident that we will continue to keep the promises, including very importantly in SAP's fiftieth year, which is starting now in 2022.
This confidence is reflected in our accelerated cloud guidance for 2022, and we have seen great progress towards our midterm ambition. We are ever more confident that we will meet or exceed it, and we will continue to update all of you on that progress as we move through 2022, and really consider the future bright for SAP. Thank you. With that, back to you, Oliver.
Thank you, Christian. Thank you, Luka, for your comments. It's now over to anyone that has a question. As we mentioned earlier, the tool is open. You're free to ask a question at any time, and we'd be very grateful if you could write your name and also who you write for and who you represent. There were a couple of questions that came in just in reference to Taulia that I'd love to just get both of you to take. The essence of the question is, you've got big news today with the acquisition of Taulia. We announced an investment in Icertis earlier this week. Why don't I start with you, Christian, but I'd love you to touch on it too, Luka. What is SAP's acquisition strategy overall?
Yeah. Let me start first and then, Luka, please build on it. I mean, first, what we have seen in 2021 is actually an organic growth story. Very successful. We actually exceeded our own plan. We raised our outlook, especially in the cloud, multiple times. Of course, what we also do is we are screening the market, not for actually just buying revenue. What we do is actually that we are looking for white spots in the portfolio where we can enhance the value for our customers. Let's look at Taulia. I mean, we have the world's largest business network. We are generating billions of transactions every day with our procurement solutions. Now we are connecting the Taulia platform to actually finance these transactions, to optimize the cash flow of our customers in a significant way. We will deepen the integration.
We will join forces on the go-to-market. It's actually a win-win. We have high interest. We had already in the past a lot of asks from our customers to say, "Hey, what can SAP do in order to automate these transactions, to help us with the cash flow?" On the other side, we had a lot of banks saying, "Hey, you know, we see that you are transacting, a lot, and why can we not , really join and really do this together?" This was actually finally the reason. Again, also on an ongoing basis, we will screen. It's not only about acquisition. We just also announced a deepened partnership with Icertis.
Same story there. They are the market leader for intelligent contract management. Now we have multiple touchpoints from our HR systems, ERP, procurement, sales. It's just a high benefit, a high value for our customers now that also there they have this seamless integration between these solutions. This is what we will do on an ongoing basis. Of course, always focusing also on our organic growth.
Yeah. Perhaps to just quickly add, I think both Icertis as well as Taulia are representative of a really disciplined portfolio strategy. We know that we cannot and will not always be in a position to deliver against all of the needs of digital capabilities ourselves as SAP. We believe that we have very strong organic capabilities in areas where we have a clear competency, and we will continue to double down on those.
In areas of the portfolio where we can augment our strengths, like Christian has said in the case of Taulia, our strengths in procurement networks, our strengths in solutions for the office of the CFO. And of course, our strength in supply chain management solutions with an intelligent tuck-in capability like the supply chain financing and working capital management capabilities that Taulia brings to the table, where we can activate our ecosystem in a perfect way to amplify the growth that Taulia standalone can bring, then of course it will be a no-brainer for us to you know double down on those opportunities. Our portfolio is very broad. The white spaces, therefore, are relatively limited. From that perspective, our focus on further building out the portfolio organically clearly remains the top priority.
The next question I'll give to you, Christian. It's about our fiftieth birthday this year. It comes from Matthias Kros from Rhein-Neckar-Zeitung. The question from Matthias is, "How will SAP celebrate its fiftieth birthday this year?
Yeah, to celebrate actually first it's very important that we overcome this pandemic to keep everyone safe. That's the first priority. The second priority, yes, it's about celebrating the past, but it's also about celebrating the future. As we just talked about our portfolio, we see strong growth. We see that we can solve some of the biggest challenges of our customers. Yes, we will celebrate, but we will also invite customers, partners, analysts, media of course to join us. Then also looking ahead, what about the next 50 years? What can SAP do together with our ecosystem and our customers? Yeah, we will celebrate, but again, also strongly looking into the future.
Again, I'm consolidating a couple here, but obviously the market is very volatile right now and has been for a week or so. There's a couple of questions that basically are acknowledging, you know, our strong results, but also commenting on our share price not really following yet. Luka, perhaps you could comment on that and how we think of this volatility and how we think of SAP's share price.
Yeah. First of all, of course, the movements in the share prices of both the technology sector overall and of SAP share price is not something that we can fully control. What we can focus on and will continue to focus on is to deliver against our commitments that we have given to the capital markets. So far, I would argue and claim that we have done so exceptionally well, and we have every intention of doing so in the future as well. I can understand the volatility because obviously there are lots of macro considerations at play presently. At the same time, I have to say that I continue to adamantly believe that SAP is undervalued at present.
We have one of the fastest growing cloud businesses on the applications front that you can find in the market. We have a SaaS PaaS portfolio of greater than EUR 5.5 billion outside of intelligent spend that is growing in the thirties. We will continue to see increases in the growth rate in our cloud business in core ERP. Absolutely, we will continue to see improvements in our efficiency across the business and the return to double-digit growth as of 2023 in operating profit and significant surges in the cloud margins from next year onwards. If you take all of this into consideration and make a simple sum of the parts valuation, SAP certainly has significant room to further appreciate in terms of its share price performance.
We will continue to work on this, and we are confident that ultimately through consistent execution, quarter after quarter, as we have proven it now for five quarters in a row, this will be recognized by the market. The conversations that we are having with analysts, with investors as well, definitely confirm full support for the strategy that we're employing. Now it's really about continuing to deliver against that.
Thank you, Luka. Christian, there's a question about the movement of our customers to the cloud. This is from Alexander Jungert from Mannheimer Morgen.
He's thanking us for the press conference. Question for you, Mr. Klein. Some customers still hesitate to switch to the cloud. Why do you think that is, and how, what can we do to convince customers, about that shift to the cloud?
Yeah, thanks a lot for the question. First of all, you have seen from our 2021 results that there is now a large movement of our installed base to the cloud. I mean, we significantly accelerated our quotes. Also, let's face it, I mean, many customers, and we also, you know, shared some references, Siemens, Fresenius, Enel, and others, they're all going with us. Why do they do that? Yeah, because when you compare on-prem to cloud, I mean, customers just don't have the time anymore to go into complex upgrades every 7 years to modify a system landscape where they then cannot consume innovations on the fly, where they are not on the latest release. That's the first factor. Of course, we keep on innovating.
When you see how many business models we are running with S/4HANA Cloud, I mean, every customer goes through a transformation, no matter in which industry. We have multiple examples, and this is why they wanna go. Again, they don't wanna fall back into the trap of, okay, no, please give me also an agile system landscape. This is what we are giving them. Not only with S/4HANA, let's face it, I mean, we kept our promise, you know, to also integrate in a modular way, our SuccessFactors, our HR, our procurement, our travel solutions.
Again, which is also what is great to see our partners are following, Germany, all over the world, because they now see, hey, now it's time to also move and build new innovations on top of this platform, as there is the data model, there is the security. Last but not least, let's also face it, there is a lot of talk around, cybersecurity. Especially in the market, yeah, where we see, you know, small or mid-sized customers, their IT teams often cannot keep up with the pace on how the requirements evolve on the cybersecurity side, and that's another reason for our customers to move. Last but not least, to mention one final point, I mean, for us also, the data protection is also key.
What we are doing, for example, in Europe is actually that we are providing our customer, EU Access, which means that we guarantee our customer the data stays here, and that we're also having only people from the European Union touching this data, which also gives them another point to finally make the move. Overall, we are very confident. You see it also in our guidance, and this is also the feedback what we are getting , from the large share of our customers.
Thank you, Christian, and thank you for the question. Luka, back to you. There's actually a couple of questions here about free cash flow. The question I'll sort of summarize is, hey, Luka, can you comment on the outlook for free cash flow and share-based compensation charges? Why aren't you revising 2025 free cash flow to reflect the changes in our share-based compensation?
Yeah. Thank you very much for the question. It's an important one. Let's be clear, we are extremely confident about our 2025 free cash flow guidance of EUR 8 billion. We have actually landed better than what we expected in 2021, and we will certainly continue to look at that guidance as we move closer to it. We have to understand a few things. This is four years out, and cash flow can be volatile for other reasons than share-based compensation. It's affected by currency movements, it's affected by cash tax payments, and so on, and some of this is very hard to predict. On a target that is four years out, I think this significant increase that we're planning for is something we feel very confident.
If we continue to execute well, there is certainly scope for outperformance, and we will constantly evaluate this as we move closer. On the share-based compensation side, yes, of course, our move to share-based compensation for our Move SAP program is supportive of this. I need to put two things into perspective. When you take a look at our 2021 results, we had roughly EUR 1 billion in share-based compensation cash payouts. In 2025, we still expect that we will have more than EUR 500 million in such cash payouts for share-based compensation programs. Why? Because we still have, for example, a discounted share purchase program, the so-called Own SAP program, where our employees can buy shares, and we subsidize them to a certain extent. This program will continue to be cash settled.
We still have the impact in the next three years of the existing programs which were cash settled and will lead in 2022, 2023, and 2024 to cash payouts. The impact from this, I think, needs to be understood from a size perspective. Nevertheless, we are certainly very positive about our increasing effectiveness in cash collections. Our DSO, for example, has been down by 10 days year-over-year in 2021, and we continue to see benefits there also for the future. In terms of the profitability of the business, we clearly expect a significant surge, and that profitability is going to be actually the primary reason why we achieve the EUR 8 billion free cash flow.
Again, we certainly can do better than that. If we see that this is happening, then of course, we will also update the free cash flow guidance.
Thanks, Luka. There's a couple of questions on sustainability. I'm going to ask one that reflects a question about the overall extent that sustainability is a driver in some of the transformation that's happening. This is from Zuzana Kovacova from IDC Europe. She says, "Hey, obviously business agility and resiliency are the drivers behind some of the large transformation projects, such as with Siemens, IBM, Allianz. Her question really is when you look at those, to what extent is sustainability a driver versus is it actually already embedded into that transformation? Perhaps both of you I know have a lot of insight here. Christian, why don't you kick us off?
Yeah. I mean, I absolutely can start. Look, actually it's a very good question. Yes, we see transformation projects of our customers where actually sustainability is actually embedded. When we are going into the RISE journey, oftentimes we look into, okay, how will the business model change of a company? How can we redesign, certain elements around the quote to cash process to reflect this change, the way how a customer sells, the way how he supplies, the way how he bundles certain products and services. At the same time, when we are looking into the energy intensive processes, you know, we definitely already say, "Hey, look, let's not only look into the data model for your productivity. Let's not only look into the data model to have a 360 of your business.
Let's really make use of the work, what we did, you know, to expand our data model with ESG. We are already designing processes like procure to pay or design to operate, so the supply chain and manufacturing related processes in a way that a customer wants then his life that he can really make these trade-offs. Yeah. That you can see how cost-effective does affect the work, but also what is actually also the footprint of this factory. Yeah. We see that this is more and more embedded as this is not actually, sustainability is not up for a choice. Actually, every CEO, every company really gets real about that, and that's why we are also embedding it deeply into our business transformation journey with RISE.
Yeah. Perhaps I can just quickly add, because I agree with everything what Christian has said, that I think sustainability is also a driver for more and more cross-company connectivity, which needs to be digitally enabled. Business networks will be a big part of the solution, as we are doing it with Catena-X, for example, for the automotive sector. The good news is that SAP is the most relevant software partner for entire industries due to our strength in business networks and the related technologies, which can work together with entire industry consortia to completely digitize their end-to-end business processes. Because this is a challenge that not a single company on its own and only looking at its internal processes can tackle. We have the capabilities to really drive this end-to-end.
Therefore, we will see a larger share of programs where companies join forces in driving their transformation. As many of the companies in many different industries have a very high share of SAP transactional systems supporting their process landscapes, we think that this is an outsized opportunity for us to contribute.
Onto a question about our own cloud transformation at SAP. Christian, I'll start with you. This is from Peter Färbinger of E3 Magazine. He congratulates us on our cloud success, but he asks a question about, hey, how are we evolving our own incentives for our sales force in terms of, will they be cloud only? He has a second part to his question, which is, what will become of our on-premise products such as S/4HANA Cloud, Private Edition for customer data centers? Two parts to the question, Christian. Incentives for our own people in terms of our transformation and what's gonna become of our on-premise products.
Yeah, thanks a lot for the question. First, we always said we gave a long-term commitment for S/4HANA, and that includes also our on-premise version of S/4HANA. Now, with regard to incentives to our people, we give customers choice, so also we incent both business models. Obviously, what we're also doing, and this is even more important to mention, is that we are not focusing only on the point of sale anymore. RISE is a journey, and that doesn't stop at the point of sale. The incentives are much more geared now towards renewals, time to value in our consulting business, so that we are really incentivizing our people to also own customer success.
Then last but not least, yeah, when it also then comes to on-prem, we always also made a commitment that especially in the S/4HANA area, of course, we, you know, increased the innovation pace with S/4HANA Cloud and our customers will benefit off from that. If they're going with us on the RISE journey, of course, our goal is to transform the business model, to standardize business goals. Signavio was, by the way, a big success and is a big enabler for our customers because then you have proof you can benchmark against best practices. A big benefit is that we continue also then to not only work on the business processes, but also on the system landscape. We screen it, how much custom code, how many modifications are in this system?
How can we, you know, get them out of the system to also then in the future enable our customers to always stay on the latest release, to make upgrades much more automated. That's also equally important, and that's one major factor. While the large share of our customers in the meantime says, "Yes, I want to actually join the movement with RISE, and I definitely very open to also adopt S/4HANA Cloud.
Luka, anything you wanna comment or anything you wanna add on that question about our transformation to the cloud?
No, I think Christian covered it very well. Just on the on-premise piece, I mean, we have a stated commitment for the continued development of our on-premise products around S/4 out there until 2040, right? I don't think that there are many companies out there in the market that give such a long-term planning commitment to our customers, so nobody should feel at risk to be left behind.
Here's a question, a couple of questions actually. Obviously, we focus hugely on the integration of our technologies across our line of business and ERP solutions and our platform. Just where do you feel we are, Christian, on that integration process and that journey?
Yeah. I already talked about some of the, you know, progress we did in 2021. Just to give you one example, for example, what is very key for many of our customers, actually, regardless of which industry it is, in the time of a transformation, is total workforce management. Not only how many workers do I have, but also what skills do they have? How do I retrain? Now it's very important that the solutions talk to each other, and that you are not only looking at your own employees. Let's take SuccessFactors, Fieldglass, and S/4HANA, where we always have, you know, employee-related objects in for external workers, for our own employees. This is, in the meantime, completely harmonized.
When you're actually going to move to these solutions, our customers have not only a semantic data model which fits to each other, but also a joint security layer. This is what we also said we do with procure to pay, so Ariba, S/4HANA. When you source suppliers, when you then process the order, when you're gonna pay, that actually all comes in the meantime out of the box. For our on-premise customers, again, oftentimes also with modifications and with changes to the data model, we also still offer all to the APIs, to also make hybrid landscapes more integrated. We are progressing very fast. We are keeping our promise, and we will not stop, as there is always more.
We are developing new solutions, and they are already now coming with a consistent data model, with a consistent security model, which is very key, and it's a different story, and we see that also in the success in 2021 because now many more customers say, "Hey, when I'm now doing the move from my legacy ERP to S/4HANA Cloud, let's also replace the legacy HR." Yes, again, it comes out of the box.
Thanks, Christian. We're getting a few questions on our cloud metrics, including how we define and weight them. The specific part of that is you seem to see current cloud backlog as the most important figure. Why is that? Luka, can you kick us off on that?
Yeah. I'll keep it short because it is a forward-looking, key forward-looking metric. It shows how we have been successful from one key data point to another in driving for incremental order entry, as well as our renewal success. It then defines the lower end of the cloud revenue that we expect for the next 12 months to be realized with absolute certainty, not regarding any future sales success or any upcoming renewals that are not yet closed.
In that respect, it's very important to showcase the momentum that we are seeing in our business that then in the cloud business model will translate in future quarters into growth because the revenue that you see in a specific quarter is actually the measure of success from the past. That's why it's so essential to focus on this metric.
Luka, let me just stick with you. We talked about our proposed acquisitions and investments today. What about Qualtrics, one of our previous acquisitions? What % do we own right now, and are we intending to divest any more of our shares?
Yeah. Thank you very much for that question, and that's something I like to talk about, for sure. 'Cause first of all, I want to recognize, Qualtrics actually just announced their full year results and quarterly results yesterday, and they had a tremendous performance all across the year and also into Q4. They had actually quarterly growth of around about 60%, which is tremendous. So they are doing extremely well. We continue to collaborate very well on the go-to-market front as well as in solution engineering. And we are very excited to continue to work together to drive for this outpacing growth for a long time into the future. We currently own around 74% of the company.
That's due to the fact that Qualtrics closed an acquisition of a company named Clarabridge in October, and they paid for the acquisition for the most part in shares. We also had a follow-on offering in November. We do not currently intend to IPO any new shares of Qualtrics because we have completed what we told the markets at the point of the IPO what we would do.
If you remember at the last press conference early in 2021, I was asked a similar question and I said, "We want to, from a go-forward perspective, ensure that Qualtrics is equipped with significant enough cash." We talked about EUR 1 billion in order to fund their investment strategy. They had, at that point in time when we did the IPO, still a promissory note of roughly EUR 500 million outstanding to SAP. We have cleaned this up in November through our follow-on offering at Qualtrics, so Qualtrics now has round about EUR 1 billion in cash available for their investment planning. We have paid back, or Qualtrics has paid back, the promissory note completely. We have now a clean basis.
We do not see any additional IPO events on the horizon. The SAP share will remain stable for the foreseeable future now. To be perfectly frank, SAP has never sold a single share in Qualtrics since the IPO, to be also very clear.
Thank you, Luka. There's a question from Will Parsons, who's an independent analyst, and he'd love some perspectives on just the breakdown of our performance between Sales Cloud, Marketing Cloud, Commerce Cloud, and Service Cloud. Which one of you two would like to take that?
I think I can take it because I can make that very short. We don't break out our performance at that level of granularity. Actually, I would say we probably do the most detailed disclosures in terms of our different cloud business segments that you can find. We're breaking out S/4HANA, we're breaking out Intelligent Spend, we're breaking out SaaS, PaaS versus infrastructure as a service. But at this sub-solution level, we are not providing any concrete disclosures.
Yeah. Let me add maybe, Oliver, very quickly some business perspective to that. I mean, needless to say, when you look at the pandemic, of course, many of our customers, you know, also turned towards an omnichannel sales. Commerce was, of course, of high demand. With hyperscalers, we actually have the market-leading solution in this part of the portfolio. In sales and services, oftentimes actually it also goes via industry-specific capabilities. We signed a large contract on the transformation side with Coop and other retailers. We are actually co-innovating on things like returns claims management, which we built with a lot of intelligence embedded, which gives these customers a really competitive advantage. A lot is about customer loyalty management, where we're also co-innovating. There we're also winning with a lot of industry specifics.
We have, of course, CPQ, so configure price quote, which is a huge success. As obviously customers, when they transform their business models, they need different ways of selling, different way of quoting, pricing. Where we actually also, you know, have the market leading solution with CallidusCloud we once acquired. Again, as we had this question early on, in the meantime, fully integrated also then with S/4HANA downstream.
Thank you, Christian. Luka, you get the final question. Which is, hey, it's anonymous, but hey, we'll take it. Any indication on the dividend?
Yeah, sure. Happy to cover this. Obviously the final dividend decision is up to the supervisory board to make, and this will happen in late February. To be very clear, SAP has just closed an extremely strong year, 2021. We are going to celebrate our 50th anniversary in 2022. We have a clear history of progressive dividend payouts. SAP has had many years now of dividend increases, and it is safe to assume that the dividend also in May this year will increase. By how much, that's up for the supervisory board to finally decide. Rest assured that we will make an attractive proposal.
Luka Mucic, Christian Klein, thank you so much for being here. Most of all, thank you to all of you for joining and for spending your time with us today. We wish all of you from all of us at SAP a happy and healthy 2022, and we're really looking forward to seeing many of you again and talking to many of you again over the next few months. Thank you for being with us today.
Thanks a lot. Take care.
Thank you.