Good afternoon and good evening. My name is Stefan Gruber, head of Investor Relations. A warm welcome from my side to our SAPPHIRE NOW Financial Analyst Conference. Usually from Orlando, and I would prefer to be meeting with you in person in Orlando, but we are holding the event virtually once again due to the ongoing pandemic. If you didn't have a chance to listen to the SAPPHIRE NOW keynote on June 2nd, I encourage you to take the time to watch the replay, as it laid out as a holistic basis for what we are discussing today. I can also highly recommend viewing the additional SAPPHIRE NOW content available on sap.com. Now for today, we have prepared a rich agenda for you. This is the first financial analyst conference since November of 2019 we are hosting.
We'll kick it off with our CEO, Christian Klein, who will discuss the latest strategic developments. We'll hold two moderated discussions. First, Executive Board Members Juergen Mueller and Thomas Saueressig will discuss how SAP develops the solutions needed to build the intelligent enterprise. Executive Board Members Scott Russell and Julia White will talk about the customer perspective and the need for the intelligent enterprise. Our CFO, Luka Mucic, will wrap up with a look at the financials in the context of our growth strategy. We'll have a short break before we move to a live Q&A session with the entire Executive Board of SAP. In this Q&A session, you will have the opportunity to ask questions. If you are in the Zoom call, you can ask a question by using the raise hand function. Otherwise, you can submit questions by email to investor@sap.com.
Before we get started, as usual, the famous housekeeping item, I would like to say a few words about forward-looking statements and our use of non-IFRS financial measures. Any statements made during this conference that are not historical facts are forward-looking statements as defined in the U.S. Private Securities Litigation Reform Act of 1995. Words such as anticipate, believe, estimate, expect, forecast, intent, may, plan, project, predict, should, outlook, and will, and similar expressions as they relate to SAP are intended to identify such forward-looking statements. SAP undertakes no obligation to publicly update or revise any forward-looking statements. All forward-looking statements are subject to various risks and uncertainties that could cause actual results to differ materially from expectations.
The factors that could affect SAP's future financial results are discussed more fully in our filings with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission, the SEC, including SAP's annual report on Form 20-F for 2020, filed with the SEC on March 4th, 2021. Participants of this conference are cautioned not to place undue reliance on these forward-looking statements, which speak only as of their dates. On the SAP Investor Relations website, you will find the slide deck intended to supplement today's conference available for download after the event. For those of you following the webcast, the slides will be shown as we proceed through the presentations. Unless otherwise noted, all SAP financial numbers referred to today are non-IFRS, and growth rates and percentage point changes are non-IFRS at constant currencies year-over-year.
The non-IFRS financial measures we provide should not be considered as a substitute for or superior to the measures of financial performance we prepared in accordance with IFRS. With that, I'd like to turn things over to our CEO, Christian Klein.
Thank you, Stefan, and welcome everyone to our SAP Financial Analyst Conference. We had a great start into Sapphire, where we laid out our bold plans to reinvent how the world runs with our technology. Building on my keynote, today I'm excited to share how SAP's vision and strategy will translate into our financial ambition. We will share how our innovations across our compelling portfolio deliver great customer success and accelerate SAP's cloud growth. Let's kick it off. There is no doubt that businesses will continue to invest in new technology for their business transformation, leading to a $6.8 trillion investment by 2023, growing at strong 16% per annum. The business disruption caused by the pandemic has shown us that enterprises don't achieve the resilience they need if you only migrate IT landscape to a cloud infrastructure.
This is why SAP is in the pole position to lead the business transformation of our customers by connecting the business processes with data and our technology. In fact, the crisis allowed us to build a lot of market momentum. We are the perfect partner for the necessary transformation of our customers. There is no other vendor who can drive a holistic business transformation like SAP. With RISE with SAP, we launched a new business transformation as a service offering. RISE is the answer for how our customers transform. Our leading SAP Business Technology Platform has become the foundation for our customers' transformation journey. The platform provides differentiating integration and extensibility capabilities, like one semantical data model for all our SAP solutions and non-SAP solutions.
The BTP, in conjunction with our business applications, enables our customers, first, to have a real-time 360 business view, including structured and unstructured data in one semantical data model. Second, to offer a seamless customer and employee experience across the enterprise, because a great customer experience doesn't stop with the front office, and consumers deserve a delightful experience also after the point of sale. Third, by embedding artificial intelligence and our market-leading RPA capabilities into our applications, we make sure that the workflows of our customers become more intelligent and automated. We don't stop here. We continuously drive innovation, enabling companies to turn into communities via business networks. After 50 years of successfully helping companies to achieve productivity and growth, we now also make sustainability a standard dimension of corporate management. No doubt, our future is bright, and SAP is clearly set up for success.
We offer a holistic business transformation and go beyond a pure technical migration. Our modular Cloud Suite, together with our leading SAP Business Technology Platform, creates unparalleled business value via one data model and intelligent business processes unmatched by any other third-party platform. This is exactly what our customers and partners value about SAP. We are the trusted partner for their business transformation journey. They see us as the most strategic cloud SaaS provider globally with our leading integrated and modular suite, which they clearly prefer over a bunch of best-of-breed solutions. We are playing in large and fast-growing markets with the clear ambition to stay the largest enterprise application company in the world. We are the clear number one in ERP and continuously expand our lead. Since 16 years, SAP is the global number one in ERP, supply chain, and procurement, showing the unparalleled strength of our modular ERP.
In fact, eight out of the top 10 Fortune 500 manage their supply chains with SAP. In procurement, SAP has more than six times the revenue of our next largest competitor. Over 5.5 million companies use our new established business network, transacting EUR 3.8 trillion across 190 countries. Over 180 million users work with our HXM solutions every day, and more than 100 customers with more than 100,000 users show the strength of our offering. Supplemented with our market-leading Fieldglass solution, SAP is the only vendor covering the complete employee life cycle, including payroll and total workforce management in over 200 countries. In CM, we are leading in B2B commerce and are further going to capture market share. Our new headless commerce B2C solution, SAP Upscale Commerce, makes the shopping experience easy, engaging, and personalized for end customers.
To net it out, we are the leader in 17 Gartner Magic Quadrants, underpinning the individual strengths of our solutions. Our vision is clear: to get from the intelligent enterprise to the world's largest network of intelligent enterprises to a sustainable world. Let's look into how SAP supports customers across their complete business transformation journey. The first step, becoming an intelligent enterprise. Intelligent enterprises are enabled by integrated, digitized, agile business processes, powered by data and with embedded AI. This is more relevant than ever. Businesses worldwide need to reimagine their business model. Let's be clear, only SAP can offer the capability to sell everything as a service. Tailored to the needs of the consumer with every commercial model, like pay-as-you-go or subscription. The revenue realization finally, as well as billing, happens real-time.
Let me emphasize other strong pillars of the intelligent enterprise, like creating the future of work by enabling remote work, a 360 steering of the enterprise with end-to-end planning and predictive analytics capabilities, and a world-class platform with one data model, one authorization service, and one extensibility layer. These are further strong arguments to join SAP and become an intelligent enterprise. Let me share with you a real-life example. FRAYT, a B2B food delivery service catering to the food service sector in the U.K. Normally, they sell to pubs and restaurants. Now, in just seven days, they completely flipped their business model, switching to online commerce and home delivery for 6,000 grocery products to seven million homes. Examples like that show how SAP really helps to transform companies, and we do so by continuously expanding our innovative portfolio.
For example, at Sapphire, we just announced new S/4HANA capabilities to enable our customers to deliver everything as a service. The integration of SAP SuccessFactors with Qualtrics to provide a seamless employee experience. We have created an entirely new sustainability portfolio to help companies drive sustainable practices, not only inside their organization, but across their entire value chain. The example of FRAYT shows that to truly change how an enterprise runs, companies need to adopt new business models and automate business processes. Earlier this year, we introduced RISE with SAP to address this need and answer the question, how to transform. With RISE with SAP, we bring together our technology and business process know-how to provide customers with a true business transformation as a service. The benefits are clear. We have seen incredible customer interest.
We also heard loud and clear that many customers want a holistic and modular cloud ERP solution. That's why we are expanding our offering, giving our customers even more choice with which part of their business they want to start their transformation journey. We are including HR and procurement capabilities along with SAP S/4HANA Cloud in our RISE with SAP modular cloud ERP solution. As business transformation relies on people, we are also launching a dedicated package for human experience management. This is all delivered with one data and security model and the business process intelligence to ensure your processes are fully optimized and running at the industry best standards. We are not stopping there, because SAP knows best that each industry is different and has unique needs. Therefore, we just introduced RISE with SAP for Industries.
We are starting with five industry-specific cloud offerings focused on retail, consumer products, automotive, utilities, and industrial machinery and components. We are bringing together the best of SAP's 50 years of deep industry expertise and the best of our partner ecosystem to provide industry-specific cloud-based solutions as a service. That being said, one intelligent enterprise alone already can achieve great things. COVID also made clear that we live in an interconnected world. The second step of our vision is to create a network of intelligent, sustainable enterprises. Many of the issues companies faced during the pandemic were not to be found inside their own business processes, but came from their reliance on global supply chains. Over 75% of all companies reported supply chain disruptions as a result of COVID. The reason is simple.
Many companies still manage their complex relationships as static one-to-one connections, thus lacking real-time transparency across their entire supply chain. We believe that industries will be revolutionized when businesses turn into communities. That's why we will create the world's largest business network, converging our existing procurement, logistics, asset, and industry-specific networks. We enable a network economy across every industry. Now let's imagine for a second what we can achieve when we extend this power beyond just accelerated growth and productivity. The third step of our vision towards a sustainable world. In the past, companies managed towards productivity and growth, the top and bottom line of their business operations. Recent activities underline the importance of the green line.
For example, look at the European Union's consideration for charging imports based on their carbon emissions, or the judgments from the district court in The Hague declaring reduction commitments from oil and gas companies as insufficient. As part of our commitment, we will support all sustainability KPIs proposed by the World Economic Forum in our solutions. In collaboration, we must and can work towards making the world more sustainable and chasing zero. Zero emissions, zero waste, and zero inequality.
In addition to driving innovation in and beyond our core, we continuously expand into new markets. By doing so, we increase our total addressable market, approaching EUR 600 billion in 2025, growing at a great 11% per year. With our leading suite offering, we are set up for strong growth in each category. Our cloud growth ambition is clear. We will almost triple SAP's 2020 cloud revenue over the next five years.
We will deliver over 22% growth per year to more than EUR 22 billion cloud revenue in 2025. That means growing twice as fast as our total addressable market. Looking at our opportunity space makes me more confident than ever that we will deliver on our ambition. We are clearly winning in our installed base, leveraging the tremendous cross and upsell opportunity we have at hand. We have more than EUR 11 billion software support revenue to migrate to the cloud over time, of course, with healthy conversion factors. Our modular cloud ERP is already approaching a run rate of EUR 6 billion. We will also continue to win with net new customers. Our flagship product, S/4HANA Cloud, has a net new customer share of over 40%, showing how many new customers choose our ERP for their business transformation journey.
On top of our leading ERP solution, we have several software as a service solutions with similar growth potential as Qualtrics. Take, for example, our solutions for digital supply chain, intelligent spend, business networks, commerce, BPI, and many more. We will deliver this cloud growth by executing along our interlocked strategy. Our strategic priorities are clear. First, we accelerate our move to the cloud, drive holistic business innovation, and accelerated product innovation. Second, we build the world's largest B2B platform with SAP customer and partner applications. Third, we expand our total addressable market by more than EUR 150 billion in 2025 by entering new markets such as industry cloud, business network, and sustainability. Fourth, we are focusing and incentivizing on customer success for high adoption and best-in-class renewals, and of course, a thriving ecosystem. Fifth, finally, we drive growth of our solutions through differentiating value propositions.
I very much look forward to discussing all of that with you and our SAP Executive Board during our Q&A session at the end of this event. With that, let me hand it back to Stefan for the next session. Thank you.
Well, thanks a lot, and I hope you found Christian's presentation as insightful as I did. What really stood out to me is the strategic imperative SAP has at this moment in time. The innovations we are bringing to market perfectly match our growth opportunities, such as Industry Cloud, Business Network, and most importantly, sustainability. The vision of the intelligent enterprise has become clearer and clearer as we bring this to life with our solutions. Now, let's dive a bit deeper into the key pieces needed to execute on this strategy. We'll discuss our products and innovations and how we are building the intelligent enterprise. For this, I will hand over to my colleague, Oliver Roll, our Chief Communications Officer, who will discuss this in detail with Executive Board Members Thomas Saueressig and Juergen Mueller.
Hello, everyone, and thank you for joining us at SAP's financial analyst conference. Thanks, Stefan, for the introduction. I'm Oliver Roll. I recently joined SAP as our Chief Communications Officer. I'm delighted today to be joined by two of our Board Members, Juergen Mueller, our CTO and Member of the Executive Board, Thomas Saueressig, SAP's Board Member for product engineering. Welcome to the two of you. We'd love to get some perspectives on our product portfolio from you. I'm going to kick off right away with a question to you, Thomas. In the keynotes at SAPPHIRE NOW, our customer conference, earlier today, we spoke about this concept of intelligent enterprises. We think at SAP of intelligent enterprises very simply as companies that are using integrated digital business processes as the fundamental way that they operate, with data at the core and powered by AI.
Thomas, why is it so important for customers to become intelligent enterprises?
I think, Oliver, we all have seen, especially in this pandemic, how important it is actually to be resilient. Resilience comes from agility, to be able to quickly react on changing market dynamics. That means actually that digitalization is absolutely key to be able to embrace new business models, but also to quickly adopt the supply chain, for instance. That's the reason why Intelligent Enterprise is actually a key notion. As you rightfully said, the key aspects of Intelligent Enterprise is integration and innovation. I think especially the notion around integration is extremely essential because end-to-end integrated business processes like Record to Recruit, like Lead to Cash, like Design to Operate, or Source to Pay, are absolutely vital to be able to really succeed in this time.
Resilience is a word you used, Thomas, and it's certainly a good word to describe the last year. During our SAPPHIRE NOW conference a couple of weeks ago, we heard from a number of customers who've literally reinvented their business models. Talk to us a little bit about why SAP is so well-positioned to help customers on this journey to becoming intelligent enterprises.
I think what is absolutely essential is, as we talked about, it's about business processes and new business models, and that's actually the key aspect. If you talk about digitalization, it's not just about moving workloads into a cloud infrastructure. It's actually changing how a company works and serves their customers. That's exactly what we offer with our solution portfolio. Intelligent enterprise have two key dimensions. It's integration, but also innovation. Fully integrated end-to-end processes, but also innovations, new processes, embracing artificial intelligence, basically in every process which we operate. That's actually how we use the SAP Business Technology Platform as the foundation to integrate all of our solutions, but also to embrace artificial intelligence and building all the new applications of SAP. That for sure tap into the opportunity in the broader network of companies which we serve.
I really like how you framed that, integration plus innovation with AI at the center of those two dynamics. That's a perfect spot to bring Juergen into the conversation. You mentioned, Thomas, the Business Technology Platform, and it's interesting, SAP is perhaps best known for our enterprise applications, SAP SuccessFactors, SAP Concur, SAP Ariba, and many others. The Business Technology Platform serves as the integration layer for SAP applications, and it also provides the extensibility to our customers and partners so that they can build their own custom applications. Juergen, talk to us about the Business Technology Platform, but in particular, how it supports the application portfolio that Thomas was talking about.
Yeah. We announced the SAP Business Technology Platform roughly two years ago. It is a business-centric technology platform. We serve the applications of SAP and use the Business Technology Platform to integrate the applications, to extend them, to create value from data, and we offer this to our partners and customers as well. As Christian recently said at SAPPHIRE NOW , we are building the world's largest B2B platform as a service. You both, Thomas and Oliver, said it well, the BTP is the foundation for all our applications here. As I said, it gives the ecosystem the ability to extend.
All customers want to have a clean core, want to be flexible, want to, of course, enjoy all the updates, but they want to extend their applications as well. This is what they do with the Business Technology Platform. It's always the same challenges customers have, integration, extensions, creating value from data, and the Business Technology Platform has all the technical components necessary to do that. Database, data management, planning and analytics, application development, and integration from pro code, the real coders, down to no code. Without any line of code, we now can build applications. Then, of course, intelligent technologies, IoT, AI, robotic process automation. The Business Technology Platform sits on top of hyperscaler data centers or SAP data centers. From there, we serve our customers wherever they need us.
We do have more than 22,000 partners, 1,300 already actively contributing to the Business Technology Platform as well.
That's a great way of describing it. It really is the integration layer between the applications we have, and I love the way you talk about that extensibility of the Business Technology Platform. Thomas, why don't we talk about some of our specific solutions? We talked often about end-to-end processes that we help our customers with, and there are a number of solutions behind that. Perhaps you could start by talking about SAP S/4HANA.
Yeah. Happy to do so. SAP S/4HANA is actually the core of the intelligent enterprise, connecting all the dots. I think it's also very important to really describe that as a really agile innovation platform, which we help our customers with in a fully cloud native fashion. I think that's really important for us to drive that. Quite frankly, we are very proud that we don't only serve the largest companies on Earth, but actually also the most innovative ones and the most agile ones. If you think about BCG Most Innovative Companies, 92% of the companies actually are SAP S/4HANA customers. We are very proud that we help our customers with that to really succeed and keep the innovation spirit up. I think that's very important. We use actually SAP HANA natively to really revolutionize the processes, and processes which were not thinkable before.
I think that's really, really important for us, that we actually want to create the next generation of best practices, the next best practices. It's about the processes of the future, which we jointly together with our customers actually work on. I think that's also why it's so inspirational actually to work in these times, because we all see how the world changes, and we have the opportunity together with the customers to change how people work.
Yeah, you and I have spent a little bit of time together. I really like how you described the importance of these end-to-end processes. You mentioned lead to cash, recruit to retire, source to pay, design to operate. You touched on S/4HANA, SAP S/4HANA. Talk to us a little bit more about some of the other specific innovations behind those end-to-end processes.
I think one of the topics is, for instance, in the area of human experience management, about total workforce management. For sure, you have internal employees, but also you have contingent workers. Especially in this pandemic, we have seen how flexibly we need to be able to manage the total workforce. This is exactly the intersection of SAP SuccessFactors with SAP Fieldglass, and the integration of this actually enables this total workforce management in all directions. If you think about design to operate, if you think about really having synchronized planning from the network planning down to the execution in real time, which has enabled a total level of different agility for our customers, which is absolutely vital.
If you think about customer experience, we all know the customer experience doesn't stop with the purchase or the purchase experience, but actually it goes further to the delivery in time, in quality. Also think about the returns processes, and this is exactly where our solutions bring together front office and the back office to really provide a customer experience which is stellar.
Yeah. One of the really important things with those end-to-end processes is the customer experience, and a big part of that is the user interface. I know that you've invested very heavily, your teams, on the user interface. Could you tell us a little bit more about basically what we've done and also some of your plans in improving that experience for customers?
The user experience is absolutely strategic for us, and that's the reason why we also just launched at SAPPHIRE NOW our new mobile experience, basically bringing the entire intelligent enterprise on the fingertips. Fundamentally, we believe that also mobile is actually not a device. Mobile is actually a work style preference, and this is the reason why we provide it. We even go one step further. We talk about mixed reality, leveraging, for instance, Microsoft HoloLens in the business processes or augmented reality with iOS and Android to really define how people work in the future embracing our applications. For sure, if they're intelligent, they are action driven, insightful, that you really get the right recommendations, what to do in that specific moment. Also let me add one more very important aspect to user experience.
It's actually also about accessibility, because for us it's super essential that our software provides an inclusive work environment for everybody, where everybody can participate. With that, I can just assure you to provide a delightful and enjoyable user experience is absolutely strategic for us.
I love the work that you're doing there. It's so important. Juergen, let's talk to you a little bit about a topic that I know is really important to our customers, integration. You and I had the opportunity to talk a little bit about that yesterday, and I know that it's a significant part of our work with the Business Technology Platform. Talk to us a little about how we're ensuring that all of our applications work together and how they connect well with a customer's infrastructure.
Happy to do so. Thomas and my team, we are really working closely together on this one. SAP-to-SAP integration is one of the topics that our 230 million cloud users really have top of mind. We promised to deliver these integrations, and we have been delivering on that promise. Last year alone, we delivered close to 350 functional integrations between our SaaS solutions. Now we are just left with a few final experiences to living up to the promise of full SAP-to-SAP application integration along with the defined end-to-end processes that we have. Let me just give you an example. A customer, Orica, went live in Q3 last year with S/4HANA, 12,000 employees, over 60 countries, and is now really going all-in SAP and could sunset a lot of their legacy IT.
Actually, a year before that, Thomas and I had the CIO in our developer kickoff meeting. The CIO, she said, "You need to improve on the integration." A couple of quarters later, she saw the result that we are really delivering. She's not the only one. Our customer NPS at SAP has risen by 10 percentage points over the last year. Integration, we use the technology ourselves, the SAP Integration Suite, but we are also offering this to our customers. It's a $10 billion market, integration platform as a service. SAP is a leader. More than 13,000 companies relying on this, and they actually are using more and more of it. 60% more integrations were deployed last year alone.
Thanks, Juergen, for talking so well about the focus on integration. It was good to hear the customer examples you talked about. Let's talk about a topic that is so important for the future of our planet, and I'd love to touch on this topic with both of you. Sustainability. It's fascinating. When we think about the pandemic, we saw a dramatic decrease in carbon emissions in 2020, and it might be easy to think that, hey, we've taken a step further in terms of reducing carbon emissions overall. The reality is so much more complex than that. I actually found a couple of stats, which I found frightening. Next year is set to be the second highest year in history in carbon emissions growth. In 2022, experts are predicting that actually there'll be a net increase over 2019.
The need to act is even more profound now than it was two years ago. The wonderful thing about technology, and I think also the approach SAP is taking, is that the solution is partly in our hands, given the importance of the supply chain in carbon emissions. Thomas, we'd love to hear from you a little bit about how SAP is building sustainability into our portfolio, and in doing so, helping our customers become more sustainable organizations.
First of all, I fully agree with you. Climate change is certainly the biggest challenge of humanity. Actually, we as a company, we see our role here and obligation to help, because we talk about 440,000 customers around the globe, which we can touch and impact with our solutions. We actually will embrace and embed sustainability as part of our data model that you can track, for instance, the carbon emissions end to end along the entire supply chain, and even further, not only between the four walls of the company, but in the network end to end. We also know that actually a factor of 5.5, the carbon emissions are higher in the supply chain than in their own four walls of the company. That's the reason why we started last year the Climate 21 program.
21 is not for the year 2021, but actually for the 21st century. With that, we already deliver a lot of innovations like SAP Product Footprint Management, which is giving you these insights, these actionable insights, to really actively reduce the carbon footprint. With that, it's key for decarbonization of the industries. As well, to get a low carbon future, we need to talk about circularity. Circular economy is a key lever. What is the output for the one company can be a valuable input for the other company. Again, 440,000 companies in a broad network together, we can optimize that. That's the reason why we actually embrace circular economy with our product like SAP Responsible Design and Production, which we have to help our customers there. We don't stop because sustainability is holistically also about, for instance, HR, diversity and inclusion.
That's the reason why it's part of our SAP SuccessFactors portfolio. As we touch all the aspects, like including ethical sourcing in our procurement portfolio, in sustainability in our portfolio, we also will provide the SAP Sustainability Control Tower, which is helping to serve all the ESG dimensions, and with that, give you the information where you are on that journey, but also, quite frankly, to continuously optimize it along the way. We do believe that actually we need to think differently about the success of the company. It's not just about financial metrics like the top line or the bottom line. Let's act jointly together, collectively, the green line of sustainability as part of the purpose of every company.
Thomas, it's fascinating to kind of think about how you've described things. You've really talked about how our customers can build sustainability into the very fabric of how they do businesses. I love the way you talked about full visibility across the supply chain and this ability to turn insights into actions. It's great to see that in the SAP portfolio. Let's, Juergen, bring you into the conversation and get just a perspective from you. I know both of you think of our innovation and our technology roadmap from a short-term perspective, a medium perspective, and a long-term perspective.
Juergen, can you just give us a couple of observations and perspectives on how does SAP think about sustainability in the long term in terms of how we ensure we will continue to build those sort of services that Thomas touched on into our portfolio for the long term?
We really want a world with zero waste, zero emissions, and zero inequality. You will see SAP pushing for that ourselves as a role model and also enabling our customers and partners. Of course, the technology platform is again, the foundation for this. As Thomas mentioned, we can extend our data model by, for example, tracking emissions through the supply chain. We can have partners and SAP build solutions, and we have so many customers that, for example, use our embedded analytics capabilities. Here we already support ESG reporting, for example, with predefined context and content. That is what we are continuing to do in all processes, in all areas of our technology and application business.
Let's turn to something you touched on earlier, Thomas. You talked about the importance of businesses working together and how we're also seeing this shift from one-to-one connections to kind of networks of companies working together. I think the supply chain issues that many of us faced over the last 12, 18 months are certainly an example of why those business networks are so important. At SAPPHIRE NOW , a couple of weeks ago, SAP announced the Business Network, the world's largest business network, and I think we have more than 550,000 businesses taking part in that. Could you just give us a sense of what's actually new here?
As you said, we already live in a totally interconnected world, so networks are reality, but we actually bring them together to give them the insights, the visibility, but also the flexibility to maneuver through that. That's the reason why we bring together our assets like the SAP Asset Intelligence Network, SAP Logistics Business Network, as well as our procurement network with SAP Ariba under one network. That's the reason why we launched also the new Trading Partner Portal, bringing all these aspects together, simplifying the onboarding for suppliers and buyers, giving more insights and data visibility into the entire flow of the entire business which you're running. That's actually an unprecedented opportunity which we have here together, talking about more than 5.5 million trading partners, which we already bring together in this open network which we have available.
It's interesting actually, because what you've just described is similar to what you've talking about earlier with both the integration and the user experience. We've brought different networks together, and the example you gave about the Trading Partner Portal, I assume that's a way to very easily access that network and figure out what options there are to move forward. Is that right?
Exactly. It's kind of a LinkedIn for the business with certified businesses which you can tap into and make business with, and that you also can be assured that actually whatever you do, it's an ethical business, and it's the right way to do business with. I think that's also a very important notion these days. What we also see actually is that we for sure also have industry-specific networks, that's one of the areas where we just together announced with our partners, the new Catena-X Automotive Network, together with partners like BMW, Volkswagen, Daimler, Schaeffler, Bosch, and the likes to really form that industry-specific network. I think there you really see the power if you bring together the Tier 1 suppliers of the OEMs, what kind of new processes you can actually enable. That's a total different level of quality management, sustainability, and the like.
That's a great example to actually explore. I love the automobile example. Tell us a little bit about how that works in practice.
If you think about quality processes, for sure, the suppliers actually need information and data about the real performance of the car, for instance. Now you want to have specific information for a specific part of a car, and that can be the Tier 1 supplier . In order to improve that specific bit, you need to have the end-to-end process in mind and the end-to-end chain of the network till it's really the finished good, which the consumer actually tries. There we have now collaborative quality management in place. Also, if you think about sustainability management, in order to really judge how sustainable an electronic car, for instance, is, you need to track that down to the raw material in the entire chain. Again, bringing the network of all parties in this network together is an unprecedented opportunity.
It's interesting. It sounds like we're really focusing in two areas. We're bringing existing networks together, but then within those individual communities of industries and companies sort of in similar industries, we're providing very specialist help and abilities to kind of work together more effectively. Let's come to a question I've been really looking forward to asking you both. You two are in two of the coolest roles at SAP, and every day your teams are creating innovations that help our customers do amazing things. I know you're experimenting a lot, you're creating, you're innovating, you're bringing our portfolio to customers. We'd love to get a sense of when you think about our pipeline, what are you most excited about and what are you working on in your areas?
Juergen, why don't we start with you with the SAP Business Technology Platform and all of the innovations your teams are working around?
There's so much cool stuff going on, Oliver, to be honest. In the database data management space, we are creating with HANA Cloud, a leading cloud database. End of last year, we were nominated a leader by Gartner in their first cloud database management, Gartner Magic Quadrant. At Sapphire, we launched a lot of new innovations, a data marketplace for SAP Data Warehouse Cloud, for example, data lake services for SAP HANA Cloud. We have a lot going on with business process intelligence to really helping customers to understand how the processes run in reality in their companies and then to improve them. If you ask me for one, and I see that you are curious, for, hey, what do you think is the most important?
I do want to ask you for one. No, pick one. Go on. Pick one.
I have to pick planning. We are announcing a foundation for enterprise planning built on SAP Business Technology Platform. Why is that so important? In this pandemic, companies had to change a lot. In many countries, the economy is coming back. Companies again are re-planning. Why? Commodity price changes. We have chip shortage. We talked about becoming a green company. That really is core for many companies now, and they need synchronized cross-company planning. I think this really can be one of these huge boosters for our complete economy. If you are, for example, a consumer packaged goods company, you have demand plans. You think what you can sell somewhere, but you need to have the right marketing plan behind. There, you need to have the right production plan behind.
There, you need to have the complete supply chain behind and ready with warehouses, transportation management, including, of course, the reverse supply chain. Who makes it happen? Employees make it happen. You need to have workforce planning to find out where you need which employees with which skills, and so on. Of course, all of that has impact on your financial plan. SAP is already a leader in financial planning, is already amazing in workforce planning, and this is the foundation for us. With the lead that we also have in supply chain planning, we think we have the right areas in place to tackle the whole end-to-end synchronous planning challenge of companies. Not because it's easy, but because it has the most impact.
That's such a good example, Juergen. It also speaks exactly what Thomas was talking about earlier in terms of integration and innovation. I'd love to just get a couple of perspectives from you, Juergen, on the AI behind what you've just described and how that AI is powering kind of that set of solutions you're working on in enterprise planning.
It is really the integration and innovation, AI plays a major role. Thomas also mentions that regularly. We stopped counting. 300+ AI capabilities embedded in our applications. That is the huge difference. AI with SAP comes embedded in SAP applications, that is also recognized by analysts, where they say, yes, for planning, but also for AI capabilities, SAP is a leader in enterprise applications. Take the latest example, Concur Verify. You have expenses, hopefully soon, more and more again when we continue traveling. We have expenses, we have an automatic auditing process behind leveraging AI. That is an add-on to Concur, it goes back, it looks at the policies the company has.
It looks at what is reasonable, what is not reasonable, and then goes back decades of years and tens of millions of data points in order to determine whether there might be a potential problem with that expense report that has been handed in. This is just 1 example of how we help. Let me pick one more from the pharma and healthcare industry. Pharma, one of the largest APJ pharma companies, actually had a lot of new requests and sales orders during the pandemic. Actually, they had up to 30 times, 30 times more orders, and a lot of them initially needed manual processing. They deployed SAP S/4HANA, AI services, workflow services from SAP and more.
Now they automated all of that, and not just they can process up to 100,000 orders per day with SAP, so we all get more pharmaceutical products, but also actually, they could free up people from mundane tasks who now can act strategically with customers and partners to help even more. That is just what excites me, what excites us as SAP, when we can help the society run at its best.
I love seeing the energy just in how you've told the stories, really good customer examples, but I love how it comes back to integration, innovation with embedded AI. Thomas, you've got an equally cool job as Juergen. Tell us about what you're most excited about when you think about our innovations and our technology roadmap.
I think what I'm the most excited about is actually the impact we can have with really changing how people work, how companies operate in this interconnected world, and this is actually super exciting for me. If you think about it, we actually take enterprise software to the next level. We embrace sustainability, make it fully networked, and for sure, include AI in every process. With that, actually, we actually don't want to be the market leader for enterprise software. We actually want to make the market for this next generation of software, which we deliver to our customers, the next best practices of processes and also the new business models, which we actually enable. This is actually something which excites me the most.
For sure, in a new way, fully all in the cloud, but also in a modular fashion that customers can consume the innovations which we continuously deliver in an easy fashion with a quick time to value. That is actually something which is driving me every single day, how we can help our customers to succeed. This is something we're really excited about.
Yeah. It's fascinating how you describe that because sustainability is so critical for all of us, yet we're at such an embryonic stage in terms of the technology that's been developed. I love how you talked about how SAP's in this unique position to actually lead a technology wave of development. I'm going to ask you just what we asked Juergen, give us one example of one technology, perhaps in the sustainability space, that you think is particularly cool and you're very excited about in terms of what we're working on.
I think actually, what I'm super excited is the SAP Sustainability Control Tower, which brings together all aspects of sustainability for ethical sourcing, diversity, and inclusion from the responsible design and production to actually decarbonization to have this all together. This is all fully built on the SAP Business Technology Platform, embracing also AI to give recommendations that you know actually where to tap into to improve your sustainability. This is something, this is the power which we can have, tapping into all of the 440,000 customers running the end-to-end processes. I think this is a huge opportunity which we have. As we talked earlier, this is all in the network because that's where the most carbon is actually created, and that's the reason why it's so central.
That's also why I'm actually so convinced that this is a unique proposition which we can offer here.
Such a good example and such an important focus area. Thomas Saueressig, Juergen Mueller, thank you so much for joining us today at SAP's Financial Analyst Conference.
Thank you.
Thank you.
Thanks a lot. What a wording, embryonic stage, I'm quoting my colleague, Oliver. How are we building the intelligent enterprise? Listening to the conversation, it struck me how we are infusing customer feedback into our development processes to ensure customers know their feedback is being heard. This is exemplified by the delivery of the broadest integration. Also, how we are recognizing and acting on our responsibility for a better world. Sustainability is the keyword. Creating solutions for companies to transition to a circular economy, for example. I'm sure you are interested in hearing a fresh perspective on SAP's go-to-market approach and why customers need to become intelligent enterprises. Executive Board Members Julia White and Scott Russell will now share their insights in a moderated discussion hosted again by Oliver. Over to you, Oliver.
Hello again, everyone, and welcome back. I hope you enjoyed the conversation with Thomas and Juergen. I'm delighted now to welcome our two newest executive board members, Julia White, our Chief Marketing and Solutions Officer, and Scott Russell, our board member for the Customer Success Organization. Scott, Julia, welcome to Investor Day. It's great to have you here. Julia, let's start with you. You joined in March as SAP's Chief Marketing and Solutions Officer, and you spent nearly 20 years with Microsoft in leadership positions across Office, Azure, and the server portfolio. Tell us a little bit about your background and what attracted you to SAP.
Well, absolutely. As you said, I spent a long time at Microsoft, primarily focused in key cloud growth and transformation areas. The transition of the Office business to become Office 365 for many years, and then the past five leading the Azure side of the business. Starting when it was just a few EUR hundred million in revenue, to the point where it was the clear number two cloud with multiple EUR billion of revenue. Just an amazing opportunity of transformation and also rapid growth. What brought me to SAP is actually the opportunity to work at the business process layer of technology, because that's where real transformation happens, and that's where the real business impact happens, so things like sustainability, as Thomas talked about. Working around that layer at Microsoft, at the infrastructure layer, the productivity layer, is fantastic.
This is where so much happens at the real business impact, love that part of it. I think also just it's a fantastic new leadership team at SAP that I honestly just couldn't be more excited to work with. A really important time of business and cultural transformation. That's the work I love, and I have a lot of experience doing it, so it's a good match to what I have to bring. Lastly, it's super clear to me that SAP has so much to offer that the world doesn't really understand yet. As a marketing leader, I feel like there's just a phenomenal opportunity to close the gap between what the world knows about us and what we have to tell the world.
Yeah. It's so interesting, these transformations that companies like SAP, we're all going through the same transformations. It's good to have you here, Julia. Scott, welcome to you as well. You recently, earlier this year, took on leadership of our customer success organization. You spent 10 years in the APJ region in multiple roles, but most recently as president. Before that, you had a career at IBM. Tell us a little bit about your background and your leading this new customer success organization.
Yeah. Thanks, Oliver Roll, great to be here and with Julia White. Look, I guess I would describe my career in very simple terms. It's about creating value for our customers through technology. One of the best things about my role is I get to listen and learn every day, speaking to customers around the world about, as Julia White described, their business processes, their key needs, and how they drive growth and differentiation of their business, and how technology can help them in their journey. The name of our organization, Customer Success, just says it all. We know that we're only successful when our customers are successful, and our team is singularly focused on maximizing the success of our customers throughout the lifetime of their relationship with us, which we hope is a very long period of time.
With the Customer Success board area, we've really unified our identity, but also our vision as one team. It leaves no doubt to what the ultimate KPI is, and that is customer success. At the end of the day, SAP is only successful when our customers are successful, and that's what drives us.
That's such a straightforward way to think about it, value for customers. I imagine there are two parts to customer success, helping customers decide upon the right technical solution, and then helping them figure out the best way to adopt it. Thomas and Juergen talked about the product portfolio, but let's talk a little bit about our GTM approach and what's changed in our sales approach, and how we help customers adopt and get the most from the portfolio.
Yeah. I guess there's three things, Oliver, that really describes this journey. The first step was about simplifying the engagement experience for customers. Whether they were small, medium, or large, we brought all of our field-facing teams together, including sales, services, customer engagement, and partner teams and the ecosystem teams, to really ensure every team was aligned to how to best respond and support each customer. The organization's only one part of the solution. The next step was about shifting mindsets, behaviors within the team through a new operating model that really was about putting the customer at the center through the cycle of purchase, adoption, value, and renewal, but every step of that engagement being the customer at the very center.
What's different, and I would argue what's really exciting about this, is that all of our teams, regardless of the function, are looking at the value and the experience of our customers and how our customers derive that value in a much more holistic perspective. They're not just vested in their part of the phase, but they're also looking at the entire life cycle to ensure that we deliver value at any time, at any given point in a much more fluid engagement motion. I guess finally, and importantly, we built objectives, compensation structures, and measures that are shared across the entire team. When our customer is successful, that reward and that shared success is within SAP and our customer success teams as well.
It's so interesting how you describe that, isn't it, Scott? It's so much more of an organization always. I love how you talked about organization and mindset change and processes. Julia, back to you. I think you're working hand in hand with Scott in ensuring the customer has one seamless experience when they engage with SAP, and that's one of the reasons we set up your new board area. Tell us a little about your approach.
Absolutely. The new board area, the marketing and solutions board area, it brings together solution management or, outside of SAP might be called product management, product marketing, and our industry solutions and expertise team, our corporate marketing team, global communications, and even our government affairs. I talk about it as essentially the third leg of the stool that gives us balance, right? Working between Thomas and Juergen's engineering organization and Scott's customer success. Ultimately, why we created this area is to drive new growth for SAP. A few key ways we're looking at this, and I'm running the team this way.
Partnering with the engineering organizations to make sure as we're innovating and creating our product roadmaps, we're looking at what's possible from technology and mapping it to the greatest customer need and the largest market opportunity for SAP, so making sure we have that tight alignment. The next is on then translating our technology innovation into customer value, and then ensuring the right modern marketing and demand gen tactics so that we know that we're going to hit those growth aspirations. From a business model innovation perspective, making sure we are doing that maximization of revenue and market share and finding that balance. Working incredibly closely with Scott and his organization, making sure that we're arming the organization with the right tools, the right resources, that they can exceed their targets.
If I step back for a second also, it's really about making sure that the value and the capability that I know we have inside SAP is clear to the external world. I know many people know the brand of SAP, but not as many people understand the value we have to offer. For me, it's a really big opportunity, as I mentioned. SAP has this incredible foundation of deep industry understanding, remarkable customer trust. They really build and run their organizations on SAP technology, right? We're not afraid to do the hard, complex work that sometimes intimidates other technology vendors. We have a lot of wonderful strengths and foundation. It allows to build and grow from there.
Julia, what was really interesting about how you talked about your new organization is you talked about innovation, not only in the way we market, but in the way that we help customers find the right solution, and also those processes that we need to innovate with to bring those three legs of the stool together. If I may, Julia, I'm going to stay with you, and let's talk about RISE with SAP. Scott, I'd love to get some perspectives from you in a moment on RISE with SAP as well. We announced RISE with SAP earlier this year in January, and it's a new offering to help customers both transition to the cloud, but at the same time transform their business processes. Simply put, you could say it's business transformation as a service.
Julia, give us a little bit more color on that, if you would.
Absolutely, Oliver. First, it starts with the core ERP technology with our S/4HANA Cloud offering and the migration services to run that on any hyperscaler. SAP manages this experience for the customer end to end. From a technology stack perspective, the customer has that one hand to shake, right? SAP manages the cloud solution on behalf of the customer, so they know they have best-in-class capabilities around that. Beyond the core elements, it's also about, again, that business transformation. We have our business process intelligence capabilities. What that does is it discovers and understands our customer's existing business processes through what is called business process mining. What we do is we take that, once we understand the processes, and benchmark them across a large set of real-world industry benchmarks to see how they perform and where there's opportunity.
You can even simulate changes such that we, as we're adapting and adjusting those business processes and deploying them with S/4HANA Cloud, we know that the customer's getting those benefits, and that's the transformation aspect of it. It's not just moving to the cloud, it's about getting those new capabilities and best-class processes in place as well. Lastly, we provide access to the business network, right? Because increasingly, that's part of doing B2B overall. It gives all of those capabilities as a single solution for our customers.
It's actually interesting how you describe that in terms of one hand to shake. It goes back to what Scott was talking about earlier, which is how can SAP simplify its organization so that it's easier for customers to engage us. Scott, let's turn to you on RISE with SAP. It'd be great to get some perspectives from you about how customers are responding. During our Q1 earnings, we announced some positive momentum, but what are you hearing from customers?
Thanks, Oliver. Well, we're seeing really encouraging momentum. As you heard, during our Q1 earnings, we announced over 100 RISE transactions in Q1, despite only launching the offering in the end of January. We've got interest across all geographies and industries with brands like Carrefour, Kia, Fonterra, choosing RISE with SAP to really drive and be the enabling engine of their strategic transformation. Our S/4HANA current cloud backlog now exceeds over EUR 1 billion, which was up 43%, we also grew new cloud bookings in triple-digit growth. Really great start and great momentum. You asked about what are we hearing from our customers. Well, I had the opportunity recently to speak at length with two leaders from two very different industries on their RISE with SAP journey.
One was with Sven Krause, who's the CIO of a U.S.-based healthcare provider at Hillrom, and the other is Tom Pfaff, who I've known for many years, who leads the finance and strategy for Standard Chartered Bank. Even though their businesses are incredibly different, the catalyst for their journey of RISE with SAP was actually very similar. It was about moving not only to the cloud from a technology sense, but it was using the cloud as a way to be able to lead and differentiate in their industries. In both cases, SAP, we've partnered closely with them in defining, aligning those aspirations, but also not just shifting technology, but driving and enabling that business transformation as a service. For all of these companies and many more, this is more than just moving to the cloud or an infrastructure migration.
It's really about business transformation in the cloud. It's more value for them, mission-critical processes in a simplified experience in the cloud with SAP. It's elements that Julia just spoke to, like our BPI capability, that allows RISE customers to really thoroughly assess their processes, identify changes that can drive the greatest value, including its benchmarks, identifying gaps, and also opportunities to design new processes in a new desired state in a really simple, easy way. We even announced last week as well at how we're extending the core RISE offering even for different industry domains and lines of businesses like procurement, human experience management, for example. The noise and the feedback from our customers is deafening. They want to transform in the cloud, and they want to do it with SAP.
Lots of great customer momentum, Scott. What I really liked about the two customer examples you spoke about, it was so clear that RISE with SAP is both about helping customers move to the cloud, but more importantly, helping them transform their businesses at the same time. Julia, let's switch to you again and talk about some of the announcements we made at our annual customer conference, SAP Sapphire, a couple of weeks ago. It was virtual again for the second year in a row. We have hope that next year we'll all meet in person. At SAPPHIRE NOW , we announced five new RISE with SAP industry solutions in retail, consumer products, automotive, utilities, and industrial machinery and components. Why these verticals and are there any others in the pipeline?
Absolutely. First is some context. Essentially, these offerings are based on our nearly 50 years of deep industry expertise. Everything we do really has this industry orientation, and basically that from SAP, but also a robust partner ecosystem that has a lot of industry expertise as well, and pulling that together. Again, as you mentioned, starting in these five areas of industry. Just to make it real for a second, what we're talking about. In our retail offering, we have things like SAP Omnichannel Promotion Pricing or Retail Merchandise Management, Intelligent Returns Management. Very specific retail business specific applications that are really built oftentimes in partnership with customers so that we know we're building the right technology. It's not tech for tech's sake, but really grounded in the expertise of that industry. Bringing those together and then also our partner solutions.
Then just to tie it back to what Juergen talked about, all of this is built on the Business Technology Platform, right? It has the integration, that extensibility, the one data model, all of it pulling it together, of course, all natively working with S/4HANA Cloud. We have expertise in over 20 industries, right? With this incredible depth that SAP has. This is the beginning. These five are our start because we want to be iterative, we want to be agile. We want to start with these. We want to learn, we want to grow from there, and then add more based on real customer demand and where we see the opportunity to grow. Certainly expect more to come, but also trying to be very thoughtful and really listen to the market as we do that.
What was really interesting, Julia, about how you described those industry offerings, it is so much about the specific vertical application and the way that we can help customers in those different sectors. I imagine, Scott, the customers are also asking us about modular solutions. I know we have many of those in our offerings. There must be a new opportunity for us to upsell and cross-sell. Tell us a little bit about that modular approach, that modular set of offerings, and what that means in terms of our ability to sell.
For sure, Oliver. As Thomas and Juergen just discussed, we have invested heavily in integrating end-to-end business processes and experiences across the entire value chain to move to a modular suite offering in the cloud. What this means is it's a new pre-integrated modular bundles that create value for our customers immediately. Let's take an example. You use S/4. You need to be able to procure and drive your supply, maybe to solve for your employees with human experience management in an industry flavor, and being able to provide that rapid time to value from a fully integrated suite right out of the box. The modular approach actually it creates that flexibility. For new and existing customers, they can take the entire suite that RISE has to offer, or they can prioritize which modules that they will adopt over time according to their priorities.
RISE is therefore it's a huge catalyst to upsell and cross-sell our broader cloud portfolio. If we look at our top strategic customers, about 60% of these customers had five or more cloud LoB solutions. In addition to that, they're co-innovating with us to become intelligent enterprises. I guess now it's our opportunity to really scale this approach in the rest of our vast customer base. Maybe I can put it in pretty simple terms that's easy to remember as a rule of thumb. If we earn EUR 1 from a customer running S/4HANA ERP, this should expand to approximately EUR 4 as they adopt our broader cloud portfolio over time. The economics make sense.
Thank you both of you. We've talked about RISE with SAP. Julia, you talked to us about the new industry offerings for RISE with SAP, and thanks, Scott, for talking about that modular set of offerings that we offer customers and the ability for us to upsell and cross-sell. Let's switch to a little bit of a conversation on partners who obviously play a huge role in helping our customers adopt these technologies. I'll stay with you for a moment, Scott. Can you just talk broadly about the role partners are playing with RISE with SAP?
Yeah. We're not the only ones that are really experiencing the momentum and the positivity that I and Julia have spoken about. Our partners, too, who are and will continue to be just so crucial for our customers and SAP to bring RISE with SAP to the market and help us to build scale with our reach, but also in our partnership that ultimately allows our customers to make the move, plot the path to mass adoption across industries and geographies. You see names like Accenture, Deloitte, Atos, IBM, and many others building incredibly fast momentum in the market with us, and it's exciting to watch the power of our partnerships and industry leaders in their own right working in concert with us around this offering.
Julia, over to you. I'd love a couple of perspectives on our hyperscale partnerships. They obviously play a key role in helping our customers shift to SAP cloud services. You actually spent 10 years or 20 years with Microsoft, one of our hyperscale partners. Can you talk about the importance of our relationships with those hyperscalers in helping both existing and new customers?
Absolutely, Oliver. I mean, the hyperscalers are critical to our cloud growth, and we've really strengthened these partnerships over the years to benefit our customers. I mean, ultimately, customers want the flexibility to build, adapt, and implement solutions that align with their cloud strategy and their provider of choice, and we want to provide that choice. We work really closely with all of the big hyperscalers, and that way we make sure that we can offer best-in-class SAP experiences regardless of which cloud the customer wants to run on ultimately. We actually see this as a real advantage to giving our customers that choice, right, and giving them the flexibility. It's work for us, but it's valuable because it gives that customer the flexibility.
Well, let's just come to a close, and I've got a question that I'd love to pose to both of you. It certainly has been a very hard year, a difficult year, a challenging year, but we're all coming out of it. It's interesting, I think there have been extraordinary examples of customers who have literally transformed their businesses to get ahead of everything that the pandemic presented to us. Often there's been no option but to transform. You've both talked eloquently about this combination of needing to help customers shift to the cloud, but also at the same time, helping them transform their businesses. I think it's interesting, often the move to the cloud may be easier, or the first thing they do, and sometimes the business transformation takes a little longer. Julia, let's start with you.
What are you most encouraged about after this fascinating year that we've all gone through and these dynamics that I've just described in terms of what customers are going through?
Yeah. If you look at what happened a lot through the past year and a half, right, is, as you said, everyone needed to pivot and transition to adapt. What I think in a large scale happened, people lifted and shifted systems to a cloud infrastructure so they could get dial up or dial down solutions, right, based on what was happening in the market. Also we saw them wrap real quick and easy no-code applications, like a hospital standing up in a mobile app to triage hospital bed capacity. Those type of things happened quickly, and it made sense in light of the speed at which these people needed to move. You saw growth in those two categories in the industry. What that didn't always happen is actually that true business process transformation, right?
Now, as we see over the past really six months or so, and then interesting from here, is that companies now, as they're looking forward and they're out of survive mode, and they're now into thrive mode. Obviously, the case for digital transformation has never been more clear. Now they're looking at doing the, I'll call it, the real business transformation work at the business process layer. Again, that is at the heart of what SAP does, and I think is what's underscoring the strength you're seeing in our business right now in our Q1 results. As we move forward as well is because people are now coming out and saying, "Now we've wrapped it around, we did the band-aid, we did the quick things.
Now we're going to do the real work and at business process layer. That's what I see and that's what I'm encouraged about and the opportunity SAP has ahead because of that.
Scott, what about you? It's certainly a year I don't think any of us will forget, but what are you most encouraged about?
Well, I definitely agree with the comments that Julia made about the opportunity to solve critical business challenges that our customers have. I guess I'm also really encouraged about the network opportunity, networks of companies to form and create far more agility in the supply chain and actually create frictionless trade and opportunity for businesses around the planet. I think Christian mentioned in his comments that over 75% of companies have encountered supply chain issues through COVID, and I think that's accurate, if not conservative. That's where the new Business Network, it's really designed to solve those types of challenges. We've been in the Business Network area for a while, but the ecosystem wasn't necessarily ready. Well, now they are. We see the shift. The industry players are coming together. They need to work together, and they see the urgency and the value of a networked approach.
For me, that's really exciting.
That was also one of the announcements a couple of weeks ago at SAP Sapphire, our Business Network. Julia White, Scott Russell, it has been fantastic to have you with us at Investor Day. Thank you for your time.
That was really insightful. In particular, as we heard from Julia White, the steps SAP is taking to ensure customers understand the value of SAP. The rule of thumb, as Scott Russell mentioned, moving from $1 to $4 over time as customers use our portfolio in a much, much broader way. I found it interesting to hear from customers that they are saying business transformation is becoming even more critical as we move out of the pandemic and customers, as Julia White said, move back into thrive mode. Of course, I'm happy to hear RISE with SAP resonates well with our customers. Scott Russell mentioned the Q1 metrics, and we'll provide an update on that in our Q2 earnings call. Julia White and Scott Russell also mentioned several announcements made at SAP Sapphire, including Industry Cloud and Business Network.
Just as a reminder, you can view all SAP Sapphire sessions on sap.com. Now to our final presentation before the Q&A today. Our CFO, Luka Mucic, needs no introduction to this audience. Luka will talk about what our growth means for our financials. Now I say the famous words, over to you, Luka.
Thanks, Stefan, and hello everybody from my side as well. Thank you very much for listening in today. This is my ninth SAPPHIRE NOW as a member of SAP's board, and I can confidently say that as a company, we have never been more on the move. We're making tremendous progress in our business model transformation to the cloud, laying the ground for sustained double-digit top and bottom-line growth in the near future. We are co-innovating with our customers and partners at unprecedented speed, driving up our customer and partner net promoter score in double digits, and we're doubling down on our commitment to remain the diversity and sustainability leader in our industry. Now, today, you've already heard Christian and my other board colleagues talk about implementing our cloud vision.
In this session, I want to give you now an update on what our accelerated transition to the cloud means from a financial perspective. Before I do that, I wanted to give you a brief recap of Q1 and highlight our great start to the year. This Q1 was my 29th quarter as SAP CFO, and during that time, we had many very good quarters. This one clearly was the single best quarter I ever experienced in my present role. Since we introduced our 2025 ambition last October and made some bold strategic decisions, we have seen tremendous momentum. This is reflected in our strong finish to 2020 and also in our stellar Q1 results. Our roadmap with new innovations, as you have heard from my board colleagues, is clearly resonating with our customers.
Earlier this year, we expanded our already very transparent financial disclosures to report on the momentum of our accelerated core ERP to cloud transition. We now disclose S/4HANA current cloud backlog and S/4HANA cloud revenue, both up 43% at constant currencies in Q1, which sets us up for significant cloud revenue growth re-acceleration. In fact, almost all of our cloud solutions saw significant double-digit order entry growth in the quarter. Paired with strong renewals, our stellar new cloud business performance allowed us to deliver 19% growth in our current cloud backlog at constant currencies. This is a quite sharp sequential re-acceleration, which is quite remarkable since Q1 usually has seasonally smaller current cloud backlog growth rates. Also, after a record prior year, our free cash flow was up double digits in Q1.
Our cloud revenue grew by 13% in Q1. Keep in mind that cloud revenue is a lagging indicator and also includes transactional revenues, which suffered in the crisis. Looking ahead, our strong new cloud business performance in Q1, actually the best that we have seen in five years, in conjunction with our healthy renewal rates, as well as the expected recovery of our transactional revenue, where we are starting to see first moderate improvements in Concur transaction volumes and the strong start of RISE with SAP, makes us very confident that we can grow our cloud business by up to 18% in 2021. Our outperformance in cloud and software revenue in Q1 was also supported by double-digit software licenses revenue growth at constant currencies. Clearly against the easiest prior year compare.
Given the increasing impact of our RISE with SAP offering, we continue to expect a decline in software licenses revenue for the full year. Our operating profit expanded strongly by 24% in Q1, this is likewise not entirely reflective of what we continue to expect for the full year due to, first of all, revenue mix shift effects, since, as previously mentioned, our high-margin software licenses performance was much better than what we expect for the rest of the year, while on the other hand, our lower-margin services business was down double digits in Q1 but is expected to improve for the rest of the year. Second, we had significant COVID-related savings in relation to events and travel compared to Q1 last year. These effects will diminish as of Q2. That being said, we continue to push towards a larger share of more predictable revenue.
In Q1, even with a strong software licenses quarter, our more predictable revenue base was already at 78% of total revenues, which is approximately 10 percentage points higher than five years ago. Finally, I'd like to briefly talk about currency effects. As you know, while our full-year outlook is stated at constant currencies, of course, we are closely monitoring currency developments. Since we provided our last currency expectations two months ago, we had further headwinds translating into an additional dampening effect of 1 percentage point on revenue and operating profit versus our prior assumption for Q2 and the full year if currencies remain at the May level for the rest of the year. That being said, we don't hold a crystal ball, and thus we stay concentrated on what we can influence and remain very confident about our underlying operational momentum.
Let me now take a step back and provide you with an overview of the composition of our holistic cloud portfolio. I realize this is a bit of a busy slide. Not everybody may be familiar with the unmatched breadth of our solution portfolio. To set us up for a deeper dive into our cloud transition, here's a brief refresher of our three cloud models, since this is how we break out our cloud revenue as well as our cloud gross margins. First, there is Intelligent Spend. This groups procurement solutions with a network aspect, so indirect and direct materials, travel, and external workforce management. These are already fully scaled businesses, which grew by 3 percentage points at constant currencies to EUR 2.7 billion in 2020. They were temporarily dampened by the impact of the COVID-19 crisis on our transactional revenue.
This impacted all 3 solutions, but I have to say mainly Concur's business due to the global travel restrictions. The good news is that Concur is starting to see first green shoots of stabilization and moderate growth in transaction volume since April, as the COVID impact begins to moderate in North America and Europe, which should start to contribute much more to growth as of 2022. Overall, Intelligent Spend is already extremely efficient and has the highest margin profile of our cloud business models. The other public cloud solutions make up the SaaS/PaaS bucket, where we have a broader mix of maturities and sizes of both acquired and organically developed solutions. This is our fastest growing cloud business model, with 27% growth at constant currencies, contributing more than 50% to our overall cloud revenue in 2020.
We are already seeing accelerated growth in SaaS/PaaS, and we expect this to continue to contribute overproportionally to our strong cloud momentum, driven by particularly high growth in S/4HANA Cloud, the Business Technology Platform, and Qualtrics, complemented by continued solid growth across the other solutions within this category. In terms of gross margins, we already took a big step forward by replacing a third-party database with HANA in our cloud delivery. This initiative helped increase the SaaS/PaaS gross margin by more than 10 percentage points in the past two years, and we expect a continued material increase in the next years to come. Third, we have our infrastructure as a service or IaaS category. This is our smallest cloud business. It basically includes our HANA Enterprise Cloud offering, where we typically host a customer's on-premise solution and provide application management services on top of that.
Now, naturally, the gross margin is lower for this business as this is a pure infrastructure business without any high-margin software elements. Nevertheless, in 2020, its gross margin increased by almost five percentage points. Going forward, we expect the share of this business to decline, as it will largely be substituted by the full SaaS RISE with SAP offering, which has a significantly higher gross margin. The T-shirt sizes that you see on the right-hand side indicate the solutions and their contributions to cloud revenue. Today, Ariba, Concur, and Human Experience Management are still the biggest cloud revenue contributors, which I would characterize as extra large cloud assets, each running at a cloud run rate of more than EUR 1 billion. However, based on Q1 results, S/4HANA Cloud is already close to an annual run rate of EUR 1 billion as well and growing extremely fast.
It is safe to assume that when we get together for our next SAPPHIRE NOW, S/4HANA Cloud will wear an XL T-shirt too. I highly recommend you to closely watch this T-shirt size develop, as frankly, I have to closely watch my own T-shirt size to develop too. In the L category, we have an exciting set of assets that are quickly scaling and are operating at more than a mid-triple digit million EUR run rate, like the Business Technology Platform, Qualtrics, and Customer Experience. As we have now gained a detailed understanding of the composition of our cloud portfolio, let me turn to the future development of our cloud business. On our path to 2025, we expect to more than triple our cloud gross profit. Two factors contribute to this.
First of all, cloud revenue is expected to grow to more than EUR 22 billion by 2025. Secondly, our cloud gross margin should expand by 10 percentage points to approximately 80% over the same time frame. Simply put, our cloud business is the prime source of our expected double-digit growth in operating profit from 2023 to 2025 and beyond. What is driving this? Let me first explain how our cloud revenue is expected to grow to more than EUR 22 billion at a CAGR of 22% through 2025. I have occasionally heard from some of you some concerns about how realistic this accelerated growth expectation is. First of all, the clear customer preference for cloud is very supportive of our journey. We have various powerful levers ensuring that we will continue to grow rapidly.
By first of all, moving significant on-premise ERP workloads to the cloud with our RISE with SAP offering, including our Business Technology Platform, as the basis for a successful business transformation to the cloud, as discussed by Scott. This implies moving a significant part from the upfront software licensing model to the ratable subscription model. We will deliver innovative solutions together with our ecosystem in new markets like industry cloud, business networks, business process intelligence, and our sustainability portfolio, as you have heard from Julia, Juergen, and Thomas in their respective sessions. Besides that, with regards to our remaining portfolio, you also heard from Scott how we will continue to have a strong focus on our Customer Success by ensuring adoption, renewal, and ultimately increasing the lifetime value from our solutions.
The completed deep-level integration between our cloud line of business applications and S/4HANA Cloud will catalyze our modular suite upsell opportunities. Last but not least, we also expect our transactional revenue to re-accelerate as of 2022, and again contribute to cloud growth as mentioned earlier. Let's take a look at the cloud gross margin trajectory. As you will remember, as we rapidly grew our cloud business earlier in the last decade, we saw very material negative revenue mix effects on margins, simply because of the lower margin profile of those cloud businesses in contrast to our high margin on-premise business. Eventually, by the end of 2018, our cloud business had reached a scale that allowed us to significantly expand cloud margins both in 2019 and also in 2020, despite the impacts from the pandemic.
It is important to understand what will drive the significant further improvement that we expect to deliver through 2025. First, as you know, we decided to accelerate the harmonization of cloud delivery together with our 4+1 strategy with the hyperscalers. This requires an incremental investment of a mid-triple digit million EUR amount over the course of this and next year, which will first have a dampening effect and lead to an only moderate cloud gross margin improvement in those two years. Once we have completed the migration end of 2022, though, we will see a significant step up in cloud margins from the more elastic and cost-effective harmonized cloud infrastructure. Our fastest-growing SaaS/PaaS cloud solutions category will actually benefit most from this step up in efficiency, which will also lead to a favorable mix effect.
The expected recovery of our high margin transactional revenue as of 2022 and going forward, will positively contribute to the cloud gross margin expansion through 2025 as well. We also expect our highest margin cloud assets, such as Business Technology Platform, including SAP Analytics Cloud and Qualtrics, to become a bigger part of our total cloud business. Not to forget our latest offering, RISE with SAP, where we are now bundling high-margin SaaS/PaaS subscription elements, as opposed to before, where we were simply selling lower margin infrastructure as a service to be used with a bring your own license model. Let me recap how this all then comes together in our midterm ambition, as communicated last year.
Over the next two years, we continue to expect to see muted growth of total revenue accompanied by a flat to slightly lower operating profit due to the short-term impact of our accelerated business model transformation from licenses to cloud. As of 2023, though, momentum should pick up considerably. The initial headwinds of the accelerated cloud transaction will start to turn into tailwinds for revenue and profit. In addition, we will also have completed our increased investment into the accelerated cloud delivery harmonization. That then in combination, will translate into accelerated total revenue growth and double-digit operating profit growth from 2023 onwards. By 2025, we expect this trajectory to take us to a total revenue greater than EUR 36 billion and an operating profit greater than EUR 11.5 billion.
This 2025 ambition also means that we will significantly increase our share of cloud revenue, making it the primary revenue stream of SAP. With that, we will also significantly increase our share of more predictable revenue to about 85% of total revenues. We will also continue to focus on bottom-line efficiency while we go through our transformation. Now, I also wanted to briefly update you on capital allocation at SAP. Our capital allocation policy remains consistent and unchanged. We first of all, focus on organic business expansion, repayment of debt, and tuck-in acquisitions. We plan to spend a roughly similar amount of capital expenditure in 2021 compared to 2020. We have significantly improved our net debt position in the last 15 months, from EUR 8.3 billion of net debt to EUR 2.7 billion until the end of Q1.
We have made three very complementary tuck-in acquisitions of Emarsys, Signavio, and AppGyver over the course of the past 12 months, all with a strong momentum as new members of the SAP family. We have also just paid a dividend of EUR 1.85 per share, representing a 17% year-over-year increase. We remain committed to a progressive dividend policy also in the future. Last but not least, we also keep our promise to evaluate share buybacks on an annual basis when we have reached sufficient visibility with regards to our other capital priorities. Now, before closing, let me emphasize our vision of chasing zero. With regards to zero emissions, we aim to become carbon neutral in our own operations by the end of 2023. That is two years earlier than previously stated.
On zero waste, we plan to continue our journey towards 100% single-use plastics free, where we are in constant communication with our suppliers and partners to lead by example. We have already made significant progress, and we are nearly 90% single-use plastics free. As a global organization with employees from over 150 nationalities, our aspiration remains that our workforce mirrors the diversity in society, including gender parity and demographics of all of the regions where we have employees in order to ensure zero inequality. We continue to aim for 30% women in management by the end of 2022 and are making great progress towards this target. Also, among many other efforts across the globe, we aim to double the share of Black and African American employees in our workforce in the United States within the next three years.
Let me wrap it up by saying that our strategic priorities are clear. As Juergen and Thomas demonstrated, we have a strong product roadmap with new innovations while building the world's largest B2B platform for integration and extensibility. With Julia and Scott driving best-in-class cloud sales and marketing, we expect to increase our TAM by expanding our offerings, for example, in industries, business networks, and sustainability solutions. This will provide multiple cross and upsell opportunities while nurturing a thriving ecosystem. Finally, RISE with SAP brings together our technology and business process know-how to provide our customers with a true business transformation as a service. All of this makes me extremely confident to deliver on our 2025 ambition. With that, let me hand it back to Stefan. Thank you.
Thank you, Luka. Beyond the comments on the T-shirt sizes, I think you provided details on not only our momentum, but also the financial mechanics of the cloud transition. Maybe the most important message of the day, as of 2023, we anticipate the accelerated cloud transition to really pay off as the initial headwinds turn into tailwinds for revenue and profit growth. There was a lot to digest today, and we have now a short, approximately 15 minutes break, and we reconvene at 5:00 P.M. CET, 11:00 A.M. Eastern for the live Q&A with the entire SAP Executive Board. Stay tuned. Welcome back, and hello again from Walldorf. I'm pleased to have the entire SAP Executive Board here to take your questions.
Joining me here in Walldorf are our CEO, Christian Klein; our Chief Financial Officer, Luka Mucic; Sabine Bendiek, our Chief People Officer; Juergen Mueller, Chief Technology Officer; and Thomas Saueressig, SAP Product Engineering. We also have virtual guests. Joining virtually from Seattle in the U.S. is Julia White, Chief Marketing and Solutions Officer. A bit late in the evening or early in the morning from Melbourne, Australia, Scott Russell, who runs Customer Success at SAP. Welcome, everybody. Thanks for taking the time. I always have a housekeeping item. Again, for the Q&A session, if you are in the Zoom call, you can ask a question by using the raise hand function. Please be sure to turn on your video. Alternatively, you can submit questions by email to investor@sap.com.
When you send us a question by email, please also mention your name and the institution you work for. Let's get started. We heard a number of presentations, really rich in content today, and I think that's a great basis to drill deeper now in the Q&A. Before we kick it off, there is one statistic I'd like to share, and that's the result of a customer survey just carried out by one of our institutional investors, AKO Capital in London. They do a lot of work around SAP, and they surveyed 75 CIOs of SAP customers with at least EUR 2.5 billion in revenue. Fairly large customers. I think we can show the chart. They asked them how their perception of SAP has changed over the last 12 months for four key attributes. Now we can see the chart.
These are the results. Says here a brief pause, so I'm pausing briefly. Well, as you can tell, we wanted to give you an easy start before we move into the really tough questions from the financial analysts and the investors. Seriously, this is obviously a great endorsement of our updated strategy and its execution. I think this survey shows, it echoes the 10-point improvement in net promoter score we've seen in 2020. It seems Juergen and Thomas have earned the most gold star stickers here. Maybe you just had to be easier, comparable, like in the financial statements. Anyway, Christian, over to you now. Any thoughts from your perspective on this AKO survey work?
Thank you, Stefan. Also first, let me also welcome everyone here worldwide, around the globe. I see very far distance, I guess I can see Adam Wood. I can only tell you, I really much like these virtual settings because they are time efficient. I also very much looking forward to also once meet you again in person and talk live face-to-face about SAP strategy. Obviously, Stefan, what can I not like about that slide? Probably I have to put it in my office. Just to look at it and see that, first of all, it's a proof point that the strategy is working. Instead of talking the numbers, we also shared in Q1 that the customer satisfaction is on an all-time high since many years. We are getting this feedback on a constant basis.
Maybe I just share a little anecdote. Yesterday, I was actually in Switzerland. We talked about a Q2 deal, and we were sitting together with a big Swiss retailer. In the room was the CEO of the customer, the CIO, the business people. On our side, it was sales, it was the architects, it were people from the industries. At the end of the meeting, the customer told me, "You know what, Christian? We really would like to drive the transformation with you. We would like to move our complete system landscape to the cloud. We want to do much more, and we want to do it with SAP. Why? Because we talked about replenishment. We talked about new ways of selling, commerce, connecting it to the supply chain.
We talked about optimizing the inventory, matching demand and supply real-time, doing predictive analytics to really better predict what is coming. There is no other software vendor who can do that. There is no other talk about industries. We have the knowledge and we have the product." They said, "Of course, I want to get rid of the modifications. I want to move to S/4HANA. I want to use RISE with SAP. You need to help us to implement the best practices for this industry. You know how to do it with BPI, you have it." There's also now this platform, and this one data model to connect, to not have these breaks between the front office and the supply chain. There's this one security layer, which the CIO very much liked in the room.
He was bought in after 10 minutes when we showed the capabilities of the platform. This is how we show that our strategy is working. Finally, the CEO also told me, "Christian, your team is really fantastic because with regard to customer success or Julia's team on the industry, they really care. They don't just call anymore when there's a deal coming. They're going with us the last mile. They are caring about us, and they drive adoption." This is for me, a customer meeting where I see, yes, we are absolutely on the right track, and the numbers are just an output of that.
Okay, fantastic. Thanks a lot. That was a nice easy warm-up question. Today, now let's move on to the more sophisticated questions from our financial analyst community. Again, as a reminder, we take questions from the Zoom webinar, but we also take questions by email. Please send your questions to investor@sap.com. The first question now comes out of the Zoom session, and it comes, let me just look here, from Adam Wood, Morgan Stanley. Adam, please go ahead.
Perfect. Thanks, Stefan. Thanks, Christian. Yeah, what I'd like to ask is around the competitive landscape. I think a lot of competitors would like to look at that breadth that you have around business processes, the industry depth, but also SAP as a system of record. I think what they'd like to do is to reduce SAP to be more that system of record and have the business transformation and optimization discussions happen with them. I think one of the risks we see there is probably mainly with the hyperscalers limiting SAP to that role. Could you talk a little bit about what you're trying to drive, what the most important things are that you want to achieve over the next one, two years to ensure that SAP really stays relevant in those business transformation discussions?
When it comes to investors, what would you encourage us to look at to ensure that we can see that change is happening and that you're driving the right things to keep yourselves relevant with the customers and to keep those discussions happening with you? Thank you.
Yeah. Thanks a lot, Adam. Let me start, and then Luka, you can build on that when it comes also to the metrics. First of all, when you look at RISE with SAP, great start in Q1. Actually, when we designed this offering, it's not a new product, but it's a response to the needs of our customers because there were many of those customers who told us, "Christian, I moved now my system landscape to the cloud, but I actually have no business model change. There is no new way of selling. There is no process automation. There is no a 360 of the supplier and the customer." This is something what we said, okay, SAP can do more.
It's not only a technical migration. When you see with RISE, we are taking the customer by the hand, sharing our best practices, sharing our knowledge, having now the tools to benchmark, to analyze, and to reconfigure the business process in a way that we provide the maximum outcome, the business outcome, not only the TCO of running the system. When you see how the portfolio is coming together, we are now coding since three years on one platform. That's a major advantage. Because, again, you cannot just claim you have a 360 of the business when you only have front office data. You also cannot just claim that you can secure the landscape end-to-end when you have a bunch of best-of-breed solutions. This is the clear advantage of SAP.
On top, with the Industry Cloud, like I just shared, everyone is talking about Industry Cloud, and I see these articles also out there. When you really look under the hood, I can tell you there is only one software vendor in that space who really understands how to reinvent industries from a business process perspective. This is our whole focus. With that, we of course, also enable now businesses to run end-to-end. With our core applications, with our industry applications, of course, data, AI plays a huge part. We are embedding that more and more into business processes, and that's our response. I don't see this threat.
Our customers, of course, want choice on the infrastructure side, but when it comes now to the platform, when it comes to the business know-how, the business processes, our applications, I don't see anyone out there who has the expertise, the depth of our portfolio. Luka, with regard to the metrics.
Yeah, thank you. Let me start with the soft metrics, the non-financial metrics. I think you already mentioned the great increase that we saw in our customer net promoter score and actually also our partner net promoter score. This is extremely important because I think it signifies the relevance that our customers ascribe to us both as a partner to their transformation, as well as on the partner side, as a relevant partner who can help them to grow. A company that is relegated to a system of record status will not enjoy this type of progress.
Now, when it comes to the financial metrics, I really encourage everyone to have a strong focus and attention to the progression of our current cloud backlog because that truly is a holistic measure of the health of our business, not only in terms of the new order entry, but also in our renewal success. As you have seen in Q1, we had a great resurgence of growth in this respect. That also does not happen if your customers don't see a prime investment case in you, in particular, in a quarter where normally there should be seasonally smaller growth rates in current cloud backlog. Last but not least, we have always been extremely transparent in how we break out the performance of our different cloud businesses. In SaaS/PaaS, you can track our growth performance.
This does not only come from one solution, S/4HANA, as great as its growth was. It actually comes from the entire strength of the portfolio, and you should see that strength coming through in a much greater upsell and cross-sell opportunities as we bring now S/4HANA together with the rest of the portfolio in a true modular cloud ERP approach. In spend, we will definitely see a resurgence of growth. These businesses were dampened by the impact of the pandemic, in particular in Concur. They are great and competitively strong assets that command an extremely high market share and will definitely show acceleration from here as well, in particular as we move into 2022. I think we give you a lot of transparency around the progress that we're making. Cloud revenues, of course, are a lagging indicator.
As we have highlighted, we had tremendous order entry momentum and have an extremely healthy current cloud backlog. Stay focused on this, and we will stay focused on continuing to execute with reliability against bringing those metrics into the great shape that we expect.
Great. Thanks. The next question here. Now we move from London to the U.S. Next question comes from Kirk Materne at Evercore. Kirk.
Great. Thanks everybody for doing this. A lot of great new information out there. I guess just maybe for me, Julia, you made one statement around sort of helping to close the perception gap, I believe is the way you put it, between sort of the capabilities of SAP and maybe the perception in the marketplace. SAP's a big company, and I was just kind of curious, what are some of the technologies that you think SAP has? I'd love for Juergen and Thomas maybe to weigh in on this as well. What is SAP doing that you think the market isn't aware of already? Then I just have one other follow-up for Juergen and Thomas. Thanks.
Sure. I'll start. Then Thomas and Juergen can certainly jump in. I would say a couple of things that are really obvious to me and I'm putting focus on right away is our industry depth. Christian already spoke to some of that. I think a lot of other vendors are making claims around industry capability when we are delivering at a level that is just remarkable and very much unmatched in my experience, working closely with lots of the other big tech vendors. So bringing that forward and helping people understand the depth and the capability we have to really transform within industries, certainly a big one. I think the business network, bringing together the capabilities across our different networks into a single integrated capability.
I think that's a space where there's been innovation for a while, but the market and the ecosystem is really ready in a way that maybe hasn't been in the past, based on COVID, based on the presence of an importance of a resilient supply chain, certainly that part of it. I would say beyond that is just the platform. I don't necessarily think SAP's known for having a platform, but it's so foundational, and it's what lights up and gives the greater capabilities across the suite. Helping people see and understand the value of our platform and the role it plays in the line of business applications is also very central.
Yeah. I think to add to that and to your question, what is very important for us, actually, we want to make the market for enterprise software. If we talk about a business transformation, this is actually where we focus. If you think about all the new business models, subscription-based businesses, consumption-based businesses, and here we have the clear market-leading solutions with our Billing and Revenue Innovation Management solutions, which actually run all of the largest companies on Earth actually to make that possible. Here you already see how important it is to have end-to-end processes. Because if you talk about this high volume which this company needs to perform, for sure you need a deep integration from the quoting system to the billing system and the revenue recognition in all of this. This is something what we can provide to really enable the future.
If you talk about the future, but what should be already today, is that we actually make the market, for instance, with sustainability. We embed sustainability dimensions in all of our products, from ethical sourcing, diversity and inclusion with regard to SuccessFactors in HR, but also think about, for sure, decarbonization and circular economy. This is something where we focus to solve the world's biggest challenges actually we have. If you talk about circularity, a key aspect is the network. We bring together more than 5.5 million trading partners actually to get the agility they need for resiliency, but also think about, again, coming back to sustainability, where you can really ensure that this end-to-end value chain is running in an optimized fashion. These are the topics we touch.
For sure, adding to that actually, and I'm very happy actually now that we launched it actually with our mobile activities, and I broke my fingers actually just on the weekend, so I'm very happy that I can perform all of my tasks on the fingertips on a mobile device with our new SAP Mobile Start application.
Thomas, it's good that you shared that. Otherwise, there would be rumors that this happened in a budget meeting with Luka. Coming up in July. You still have a left hand to break.
That's true. What you see is really a firework of innovations. I think what is a key, and that's where I want to hand over also to Juergen is actually all of that is based on the foundation of the SAP Business Technology Platform, really embedding AI in all of the activities for integration, also extensibility, leveraging that platform. We don't use AI just for automation like other vendors do. When we talk about the next best practices, how people work, we need to think differently how we use our data treasure, which we have in our systems, with new smart applications, which actually guide and help the end users to fulfill their job. This is something certainly is different than just the pure automation, because, again, think about the next best practices.
With that, I think Juergen, from a technology perspective might say a bit more.
Yeah, Thomas, it's good that you still have eight fingers left for having things on your fingertips. Let me put an emphasis on the platform. Julia and Thomas mentioned it already. We are using the SAP Business Technology Platform as the foundation for everything we are building. We are also using it to integrate our different applications that we have, and we made tremendous progress on this one. Let me only, to keep it short, put an emphasis on data. Adam, you also mentioned hyperscalers. They open up the battleground around data.
Many companies say, "Hey, the hyperscalers are actually having an interesting offering regarding data intake to a hyperscaler." Customers ask, "Hey, I have so much data stored on a hyperscaler natively." When we enter a discussion around industry, around business, around processes, they say, "My most important data is stored in SAP." This is where we have this one semantical data model everything is building upon. Yes, we did have customers that tried to go another route and say, "I rebuilt everything on a hyperscaler. I rebuilt the whole SAP data model," but all of them failed because it is very, very complex. It is not an easy walk in the park. They came back because also, for example, security reasons.
Yes, you can take data out of an ERP, but as a CIO, you want to have that risk, then, of course, you have to deal with the consequences or mitigate that. In the end, SAP is the go-to place for the most important data of companies, and this is also where we, as future innovations coming, which we are doubling down on, is planning, for example. I'm super excited about that. I mentioned it in my talk, I will not repeat it, that is an area where I think we, as a company for the society, can really have another huge impact.
That's great. Thank you all. Stefan, I'll hand it back to you. Thanks.
Okay, thanks a lot, Kirk. Now we move to the next question, and we go back to London, actually. James Goodman from Barclays. James, over to you.
Thanks, Stefan. Hi there. First a follow-up on the encouraging progress that we've seen in the customer perception of SAP. Julia, when you were talking about RISE with SAP, I think you talked about one hand to shake, which makes a lot of sense. Can you talk about how SAP's managing any additional responsibility that comes alongside that? I know you ramped up partners to support in this, is it fair to say that customers are seeing SAP as increasingly responsible for project success? If everything doesn't go smoothly, how do you protect that improving perception of SAP? Maybe if I can ask another one to Christian, it was on a comment in your opening session around the fact that SAP is set to gain share in CRM. We saw the C/4HANA launch a couple of years ago.
What's been right, what's been wrong with that kind of product approach, and what gives you the confidence that SAP is set to gain share specifically in CRM? Thank you.
Julia, you go first.
I'll quickly hand to Scott in terms of the customer success since he manages the end-to-end. Again, as we said, with RISE from a technology stack perspective, we're giving the customers that combined capability across SAP and the hyperscaler versus having them to manage the two and see which works best and have that best practice understanding. We offer that. Of course, we have our systems integrator partners around that to working with the customers on the implementation. Scott, why don't you give more color since this is what you do every day?
Yeah, sure. I think you said it well, Julia . First of all, for all of our cloud offerings, including RISE, but all of the capabilities, we will continue to leverage the hyperscalers in terms of the underlying infrastructure together with our own cloud capability and the systems integrators to ensure that we drive that transformation. I think just coming back to one of the earlier questions that was asked about why we're confident about the growth and we're looking forward. If you look at the feedback from our customers, they don't just want to move a workload into the cloud. It actually drives limited to no value. They don't get to transform their processes.
They're operating in very competitive spaces that are transforming and are dynamically moving on them, which means they need the agility of a business model that is able to cater for those changes. They need to be able to change and optimize and understand their processes. When you look at the BPI layer, to be able to understand which processes are driving the highest return or the highest improvement for them, and then be able to fine-tune that, but still have the flexibility of a platform that is able to take that modern capability that Thomas and Juergen spoke about. They need the transformation to be able to meet the competitive needs of their business going forward. Just moving workloads honestly gives them maybe some TCO in the short term, but in the long term actually acts as a barrier to their competitive strength.
When they look at us from a customer point of view, the customer is basically saying, "Help us transform our mission-critical applications simply, seamlessly in the cloud." If I take Q1 as the indication, and I look at the outlook in terms of the discussions that we've had, the pipeline and the outlook, clearly that is expected to continue. Just on the partner side, the expectation is our partners. We've already got all of our global systems integration partners that are already enabled, certified, working on their enablement to be able to serve all of their customers around the world. We're now going to the next generation and the more local partners around the planet to be able to make sure that they're able to serve local markets wherever we operate.
Their ability to be able to drive the innovation on the Business Technology Platform, help the customers be able to understand how they can drive that value using S/4 and the network and the process intelligence on the Business Technology Platform. That's why we feel that the customer's feedback has been very strong.
On the question on the CX side, I guess, here focus is key. I would say a strategy where we say we want to compete with everyone in this huge market is not a winning strategy. Now we have a clear focus. Just to give you three examples on commerce, we have the world's leading B2B commerce solution with Hybris. Now we launched a new headless commerce solution with Upscale, a very lightweight solution, where customers can open up shops on social media on the fly and really also be live with a new commerce shop within a few days, and also connect it again seamlessly to the supply chain side of the house. Then, of course, CPQ is a big focus. In many industries, we see the trend to more personalized offerings.
It's good when a salesperson configures a price quote that you have immediately the integration to the manufacturing, to the factory, to the supply chain, that you can immediately personalize the car. Next day, the OEM is actually start to manufacture it. Then you have really a seamless integration end-to-end, of course, with a lot of intelligence embedded. Last but not least, with the customer data platform with Emarsys, we actually provide this 360 view. We have content management in for data privacy, very important these days. Then, of course, also with Emarsys, we can drive personalized actions to really engage with the consumers on their way through the whole life cycle. These are our bets, and this is where we are investing in, and this is where we also see high growth.
Thank you. If we move to the next question.
Again, from London, I see here in the queue, Stefan Slowinski, Exane BNP. Stefan?
Great. Thank you, Stefan. Thanks for the presentations today. Two short ones. Just one for Luka, firstly, just on cash flow and the cash flow outlook beyond 2021. As we look at 2023 when margin revenues should scale, should we see cash flow grow sort of in line with non-IFRS profit growth? Just a second one for Scott around Sapphire. Traditionally, it's been an important sales event to build the pipeline. That's got to be a bit more challenging in a digital format. I'm just saying, how would you characterize this year's SAPPHIRE NOW event ? Has it helped build that pipeline? Are customers actually going through with converting those intentions to accelerate the move to cloud ERP or cloud supply chain into actual commitments?
Yeah, Stefan, thanks for the question. Let me start quickly on the cash flow front. Absolutely, as I shared when we unveiled our revamped strategy, we expect to reach the roughly EUR 8 billion in free cash flow that we had under the previous profit plan expected in 2023, in 2025. We're currently planning for this year to stay above EUR 4.5 billion. That's a big step up. Of course, a significant share of that will come in the years 2023-2025 for various reasons.
Not only the increase in profitability, but also to a lesser extent, that we will have completed our cloud harmonization project by then, which in 2021 and 2022 will again lead to a slightly increased CapEx need on IT CapEx in order to build up, in particular, the converged cloud infrastructure that we need for the pieces of further workloads that we will not migrate to hyperscalers, but to our own converged cloud. Other than that, definitely, free cash flow will follow very closely the profitability levels that we expect. I have to say, I'm extremely pleased about the cash collection efficiency that we have gained in 2020, we had a record performance in this respect, 2021 has continued to be extremely efficient with a 10% free cash flow increase.
The underlying efficiency in terms of collections and customer cash inflows has dramatically stepped up over the course of the last two years, and I expect this to continue to underpin a very healthy development that will then definitely get a big boost from 2023 onwards.
On the second question, I will hand to Julia White and the SAP team because the Sapphire event, which was fantastic, was something that Julia White and the team have led. Maybe just from a sales angle, which I can talk to, there's two data points that are worth sharing. The first is that because we were able to run, and it's our second year of doing so, in a virtual format, in a very targeted way, we were able to bring Sapphire, I think it's to over 90% of our top accounts we're able to interact with were through SAP Sapphire. We had high coverage because we weren't limited to the physical event only. It really broke down into regional events that were tailored to the industries and to the context of their business and their markets.
Because obviously in this environment, different countries and industries are operating in very different ways. The second is, we still got great launch, and Julia can talk to the details of what we launched, but through RISE, through BTP, through our industry focus, through Upscale that Christian mentioned earlier. Those launches and being able to then crystallize that into customer stories that we could then replicate and then share around the world, our reach was far broader. Exciting for us from a sales point of view because we were able to use it to be able to then really accelerate and progress customer conversations. Julia, maybe you can add a few comments just on what else was covered at Sapphire.
Yeah, absolutely. I think as Scott mentioned, it's a high-performance vehicle now that we've learned how to master virtual events. What we did, I mean, SAP this year took a very, I'll call it aggressive approach around delivering to a very tailored audience by audience, by region. Again, my experience across the industry, we've kind of outdone ourselves in terms of doing over the course of the month in language, again, for whether you're finance in APJ, we had a conversation and a set of customers and a set of capabilities for you. From an overall customer reach perspective, far exceeded both last year's virtual event, but far, far exceeded our in-person events of the past. Again, knowing how to use that virtual reach to have very tailored content that's more relevant, frankly, right?
In the old world when we're all together in person, it's a one size fits all, where this way we can really go to the customer with something that's very relevant to them and also represents our broad portfolio better, frankly, right? We can talk to people, particularly around HR, particularly around customer experience, particularly around ERP versus feeling like we have to do all of those things. In terms of overall customer numbers reached and depth and time spent and relevance, I think we're up across the board in all of those. We're still underway. We still have a few more weeks to go in some of the APJ regions, and Japanese and Chinese still underway today.
Good. Thank you. Now we move to the next question. I see here in the queue.
I would say from Israel, but he's back to the United States now. Mark Moerdler from Bernstein. Mark, over to you.
Thank you very much. Thank you also for all the additional color and details. I was originally going to ask this question for Christian and Julia, Given the breadth of people both in the room and on the video, maybe I'll get some additional color from others. Initially, in every cloud transition, there's a portion of the customer base where simply a shift to the cloud adds enough value to drive adoption. Much of the customer base is going to need incremental and increasing differentiation and value from cloud over staying on-premise or having the customer use a hyperscaler to move it. Can you explain how the product roadmap is going to unfold and how your marketing is going to tell the story to add more and more differentiation to drive not just the early adopters, but the rest of the customer base to shift to the cloud?
Thanks.
Yeah. Who wants to start? I start. Hey, Mark. Nice to see you again. Two things. After the launch of RISE obviously, we looked very carefully in our install base, we looked into, okay, what are the customers using? Who's sitting on procurement on-prem? Who's still also working with HCM on-prem, obviously, finance, logistics. We made these customers very targeted offers. We talked their language of their industry is this is how we would like to transform you. These are all the new technology which we really help you to adapt to a new business model, new financing options, whatever. Our supply chain industry 4.0. We made this in a very targeted way.
Now, of course, we also have seen that we have a high net new customer share because also some of the competitors who are doing some claims, actually, they have customers who would like to come over. That's the reality. There also RISE is very good. Because we do a greenfield approach. We show them how the best ERP in the world runs for their industry, and then we are moving them over. We are having a good pipeline both for the install base and for net new. Julia, on the marketing side, please add your comments on what we are doing to drive additional demand.
Absolutely. As you mentioned, with the cloud, it is now an always-on innovation, right? Part of making sure people understand the value of that is about we're communicating our roadmap. We have a very detailed roadmap of all the new capabilities coming so customers can see that there is a constant stream of innovation. It's not something like every three years or the past that I got some new capabilities, and it was disruptive to deploy them. Now it's just coming as a natural course of being part of our cloud business and our cloud base on that front. The flexibility to add new modules. We've talked about the modular ERP, and so the customers, again, with the cloud model, you can deploy pieces of it and then add more as you need, inclusive of our industry capabilities.
Again, now part of our industry cloud solutions. You can add those from both SAP and our customers as you need using that same platform, those same consistent APIs. Knowing you can keep getting that new innovation without things breaking or having disruptive changes as part of that. Those aspects and those benefits of cloud are certainly something we need to bring forward. We tend to talk about just one thing we've done versus this constant stream of new innovation, new capability, new flexibility you get both from SAP and our ecosystem building on the platform.
Yeah. I think to add to that is actually an important notion for us is for cloud. As we have this possibility to continuously deliver innovation, we also can continuously listen to our customers, and that's why we actually embedded Qualtrics in all of our applications to get straight away the end user feedback. This is for sure something our product management teams take entirely seriously. Then they see the feedback and can include it in the next delivery already so that also the end users feel the change on a continuous basis. That's for sure building up trust when we talked about the NPS increase. Also this notion is very important that we are way closer to the customers. We know in detail with the telemetry about what they actually use and adopt, and we can help them better.
When Scott and the teams on customer success, they look at the numbers and help our customers in a way different, the more intimate fashion in the cloud. I think we also should not forget those kind of aspects of cloud and advantages. We can help our customers on the business transformation and to really embrace the innovations we deliver on a really regular basis, and I think that's also very important.
Yeah. Maybe only to add one more point from my side. We also help customers make that transition. We are building the services and tools they need in order to get from where they are on-premise to the cloud. This is also included in RISE. This is true for the ERP side, it's also true for the technology side. Think integration technologies that are today on-premise. We actually help customers to go to the cloud and take their content with them where it makes sense. The same is also, for example, for analytics, because in analytics, also in BW, data warehousing, customers invested tens of millions often in services to build their models, to have their semantical model. We help them to bring this to our cloud solutions as well.
Great. That was a really broad question. Almost everybody on stage was involved. Thanks, Mark. Going to the next person in the queue, I see Michael Briest, UBS. Michael, over to you.
Great. Thank you, Stefan Gruber. Two from me as well, and probably one for Christian Klein or Thomas Saueressig to begin with. You talked about industry cloud, and I guess Julia White mentioned nearly 50 years of development, 27 industry verticals. Could you say how important that was to revenues in the sort of pre-SAP S/4HANA days, and how much of that capability is available today? Because I think Hasso Plattner was suggesting there were still some issues there in his keynote. I guess historically, partners would have often developed and delivered add-ons on their own behalf to clients. To what extent does RISE with SAP allow you to be more of a gatekeeper to those add-ons and perhaps monetize them in a way that you weren't able to before? Then a question for Luka. On the cloud growth margins, in 2023, I think the previous target was 75%.
Are you still expecting to get back to that or get to that level? By 2025, what proportion of your SAP S/4HANA Cloud installed base do you expect to be multi-tenant as opposed to single tenant? How important is that in getting that final 5 points of margin? Does RISE actually require customers to move to multi-tenant at some point in the future? Thank you.
Yeah. Let me start, Michael, on the Industry Cloud and also the opportunity for SAP, but also for our partners. First of all, when you think back before S/4HANA or on-prem, a lot of industry capability were developed around the ERP in a very monolithic architecture. Of course, we sometimes also developed different versions of industry capabilities because customers wanted to personalize, wanted to modify that. That was on the one hand side good because our ERP definitely had the industry flavor, and we learned how these industries want. Now in the cloud, it has much more potential, not only for SAP but also for partners. Because now we are building it on a modular way on the platform. When you build it once, you can put it to the digital marketplace, and then you can resell it.
You can put standard in place for the whole industry. There is a big installed base of SAP, and that of course gives you now a much better opportunity not only to deliver faster innovations in the cloud, and the customers feel that, but also to scale all developments you're having across the industry and not only doing this one-offs. Last but not least, the Industry Cloud was also for us very important because when we then talk about SAP S/4HANA and the customers want to move back to the standard to have a more agile system landscape going forward, a lot of the extensions modifications were actually in the industry camp. Now we are putting this side by side, and they can still use the same data model.
This is why I'm so convinced the Accenture, the Deloittes, the PWCs, everyone will also follow this movement because it makes a big difference if you're now developing on the SAP platform replenishment for retail, if you can use the same data model, if you can use the same authorization service as S/4. You don't need to have expensive integration technologies to somehow connect the dots. This movement is already happening. Just had today our platform review, I was really excited to see how much is already happening on Business Technology Platform industry-wise versus NetWeaver. This is of course also a key aspect of our strategy.
Perhaps to add bits, the numbers to this, Michael, when you take a look at our legacy industry solution add-ons, they represent an on-premise maintenance base of roughly EUR 4 billion. Many of those functionalities have, with the launch of S/4HANA, been actually integrated with S/4. We have a great opportunity with S/4, of course, to capitalize on this in the new architecture. On top of this, that's an add-on opportunity in the best sense, we have now these new capabilities that we built as part of Industry Cloud. That's a massive total addressable market in its own right, on top of the opportunity that we have with the industry capabilities in S/4HANA. It's a sizable double-digit TAM as we measure it up. By 2025, we're talking about EUR 16 billion, EUR 16.5 billion of TAM.
We obviously, as a leader in industries, want to capitalize on this over proportionally. On your questions around the gross margins. As you know, I've mentioned this also in my remarks previously, given the investment that we're taking into the harmonized cloud delivery, we expect continued improvements in terms of cloud gross margins in 2021 and 2022, but to a lesser extent because of the impact of the investments. In 2023, we should see a similar impact to the one that we saw when we concluded the migration away from third-party databases to HANA for some of our applications. I absolutely expect that in 2023, we should arrive somewhere in the neighborhood of the previous 2023 targets of around 75%.
From there on, we will then obviously scale with the increasing scale of the business as well as with the advantageous mix shift that we expect, given that the SaaS/PaaS area that is growing the fastest is actually going to benefit most from those investments into the harmonized cloud delivery. Also some of the highest margin assets like Qualtrics, like the BTP, like SAC, will actually also be among the fastest-growing assets and have already a very, very high gross margin. In terms of the question around S/4HANA and multi-tenant versus single tenant, I cannot give you an exact share, but I can alleviate the concerns that I think you have with your question, that there is not going to be an advantage in pursuing S/4HANA across all of the deployment models.
In actual fact, the RISE movement is going to accelerate the dissemination of previously infrastructure-as-a-service consumption with the HANA Enterprise Cloud, with a bring your own license model to a full SaaS model with RISE, which has a higher gross margin. Whether we are talking a single tenant addition for a super large customer where we are anyway enjoying already the economies of scale and are, as part of RISE, simplifying those landscapes so that they can be operated by us very efficiently. We, on top of this, have the impact from the higher share of SaaS/PaaS, and that in combination with the multi-tenant version. I believe in terms of the share, it will probably be a wave. At the moment, volumes in the recent past have been higher on the public cloud side. The value, of course, per transaction tends to be higher in private cloud.
Now, we will see in the next two, three years an increasing share of private cloud deals because of the big customers starting to make the move, and their share will be higher until it then moderates out again. By 2025, I expect more and more customers also to adopt for larger parts of their estate, the public cloud version, and that should level out. That's all with sufficient buffer modeled into our gross margin ambitions. Again, it's all accretive because we're bringing down the infrastructure-as-a-service ratio.
Michael, maybe just because this question comes so often and I see there are some concerns in the market. There's another customer opportunity just out there, large customer of an ERP solution of one of our competitors or the one competitor, and they're actually looking for a new modern ERP solution. Not happy because they want to move. We did a features and functions benchmark. We went through them for the new business models they need to drive. They're coming from the technology sector, and we tick mark, tick mark, tick mark. Everything is there. We can run your different business models. We can standardize your business processes. We are good on that one. The only question is, if they are now multi-tenant or single-tenant, is then also the question, how far can they standardize the 80 countries they're operating in?
How far can they standardize their five business divisions they are in? It's not about the product. It's also about the discipline of the customer to really standardize business processes. Sometimes the customer goes a two-step approach. They say, "Hey, in finance, I'm ready. In procurement, I'm ready. Guess what. In order management, I'm not ready yet, but we want to work on that." We want certain parts multi-tenancy, but I don't even want to talk about that. Other parts in single tenant, but we bring it together, and over time, we move all of our customers, if they want it, to the standard solution. Capabilities are there also for the very large customers, I would say.
I think just to add to that, with regard to the industry cloud, you mentioned also the partner importance. Absolutely, partners are super critical for us in the industry cloud. If you think about the number of innovations we deliver, it's more than 30 applications from SAP, more than 70 from partners. It's a huge partner play as well. The interesting piece is also that we actually evolved with this regard to really think about the next generation of processes which are required. Let's take the process for returns management. For sure, you can do returns management with our solutions. Think about the intelligent return management in the new world where everything is in an omnichannel online way, where you order way more and send way more back, like the clothes, shoes, whatever you order online. What do you do?
It's actually a very complex process. If you sell it, you resell it as secondhand, as firsthand again. If you even need to, don't do that process because the process cost is too expensive. There we can help. Also what we should not forget in industries specifically, that the lines of industries are blurring. For instance, I mentioned the Billing and Revenue Innovation Management solution, market leading. Because in telco and utilities, this was the key aspect already 20 years ago. Now, if you think about media, high tech, all actually need this capability for the new business models for subscription and consumption-based billing. There we have the capability. With the modularity we have, we can basically, in a modular fashion, bring together the right capabilities to solve the customer's problems. This is actually what is a huge advantage as well.
To add to the notion around S/4HANA Cloud, it's absolutely clear that S/4HANA Cloud is the market leading deepest solution in the market. Exactly what Christian mentioned, we need also to provide the choice for the customers to get there. We see, especially also in the net new names, a huge push for public cloud solutions. We're very happy about the progress.
Great. Well, it's really an in-depth discussion. We'll see more and more questions here in the queue. The next two questions. First, we have Mohammed Moawalla from Goldman Sachs, and then Knut Woller from Baader Bank. Please go ahead, Mo.
Great. Thank you, Stefan, and hello, everyone. I had two questions. The first one was just as we think about the customers starting their journey around migration, I know there's a lot of legacy that sort of now needs to be moved and I guess simplified to the new world. When
First question is, when do you expect the bulk of the big migrations to really commence? Are we talking sort of 2022? Secondly, as we think of the roadmap of the different products, particularly around industry cloud, when do you expect some of these industry clouds to be sort of fully ready, so that the sort of customers have that sort of runway for the migration? The second question, one for Sabine, was maybe as we think of a post-pandemic world, we see many of the tech companies already starting to shift kind of their way they work. Apple mandated employees to come back to the office three days a week, which probably yielded some controversy, but others like Google and Facebook have taken a more flexible approach. Where does SAP sit on this?
Maybe as a follow-up, Luka, will this have any implications for sort of OpEx and CapEx as you think of that kind of midterm guidance that you've laid out? Thank you.
I orchestrate. The first question, Mo, I would say on the migration, I would also like to get Scott's perspective as he's closest to the customers. I mean, look, the migrations, also big ones, large, small ones, they are already happening now. I would say there are certain industries where it's the biggest transformation need. I mean, look at us. SAP would be in nowhere's land if we wouldn't have changed completely our business model. We're also offering new commercials model, subscription pay as you go. Now we launch free tier. Trust me, without S/4HANA, impossible. Without BRIM, impossible. By the way, leading capabilities, which you don't find a second time in the market. We had a pressure. We had a business pressure.
We had people from sales standing here and said, Christian, back in the days when I was the CEO, I said, "Christian, I mean, this is not going to work, the growth, if you are not now transforming this business processes and operating with new technology." Now I see with the pandemic, obviously, I mean, everyone talks about it. I mean, we see it. I mean, when I see the one vaccine, when I see now some of the supply chain disruptions, there were so many CEOs, Mo, reaching out and said, "Hey, can you help me better demand and supply? Can you help me on the commerce side?" We had endless opportunities now, and the customers definitely accelerate their move, and they need intelligent software for that. The cloud infrastructure alone is not enough. Scott, anything to add from your side?
I think you said it very well, Christian. I mean, I certainly see, based on not only our Q1 performance, but the outlook and the discussions that we're having with the customers. To Christian's point, I think I mentioned I spoke to clients like Sten Farse and Tom Pfaff from Standard Chartered, Sten was from Hill-Rom. That need to be able to transform just as SAP did, also the way that they need to in their industries, as I mentioned before. That transformation, that migration that you asked about, that's already starting in 2021, I think it will continue going forward because it's not just about moving to a product, it's about bringing their capabilities where they get the benefits of standardization, where it makes sense, they also get the benefits of innovation in a singular platform that gives them both capabilities.
That's really what will drive their ability to compete and win in their relative industry going forward. We definitely see that. I think on the overall numbers you've seen on the S/4HANA move in terms of we're up to about 16,500 customers. We're over 9,800, I think it is, in terms of customers who are live or in migration. We see that move to that modern innovation platform continue to accelerate together with obviously our bookings and sales performance, which has been strong.
Sabine?
Sure. Let me take the question around where we stand on our ways of working coming out of the pandemic. First of all, I think we've always championed a very sort of flexible work style. We've always been capable in terms of our technologies and willing in terms of our culture and the trust we put in our people to have them work as is best fit for them. Obviously within the pandemic, we've stayed close to our people. We've talked to them, we surveyed them, what they told us around the future work style was very loud around wanting to have a hybrid work approach. It's not about fully remote, it's not about all back to the office, it's truly about hybrid work. They value that.
Actually, there is a lot of differences when you look at the different functions, when you look at the different regions. Obviously, we had to come up with kind of like global guideline around how do we make this work? Looking at our legacy, looking at the culture we have and actually looking at our technologies. I mean, we've come up with what we call the Pledge to Flex, which we've recently announced, which is basically saying we empower our people to 100% flexibility. Work from home, work sort of remote somewhere along the business requirements or work from the office.
Actually, we trust you that you know what's best, and we provide you with the tools, and we enable all of us in terms of the culture and the leadership to make sure that we're doing the right thing for our customers, for our business, and for our people. Actually, that's been greeted very well. The thing for us is that we're seeing as sort of moving ahead with this, or let's we say pushing ahead with this, we're learning a lot of great things around sort of the future vision of human experience management.
Of how do you truly support your people with the right set of technology suites? We're integrating Microsoft Teams, and obviously we're employing Qualtrics, our survey management tool, to really stay close to our people, their experiences, and what they need. It's been working really well for us.
Mm-hmm. Yeah, absolutely. Let me complement what Sabine has been saying. Sabine has been talking about our corporate culture that was always very accommodating of flexibility indeed. In Germany before the pandemic, we had our employees working 2.6 days a week, on average, away from the office. Of course, this is overlaid by local cultures, right? In some of the countries that we are operating in as a global company, there has been in the past more of a presentism culture than perhaps in other places. Here we clearly see from our surveys that we do, that indeed that desire to be more flexible, and the benefits that our employees have also realized from the phase in which they were actually working entirely from home, and that this can actually drive efficiencies as well, and productivity are now coming to bear.
While I don't expect that this will at a global level dramatically change how we think about facility related CapEx and OpEx, there will be individual changes in some of the places where we are now really consciously looking at remodeling our workspaces for more collaborative spaces, more co-innovation spaces, more flexible workspaces. At the same time can actually utilize the opportunity to modernize the spaces in a smaller facility, but at the same time in a much upgraded experience. I would say it's for the most part that we really have a chance now to come forward with a next generation office environment that will provide some savings, but not to a dramatic extent, but will make it much more productive for our employees to live up to their roles in innovation, in customer engagement, in other fashions.
That should certainly have a positive impact on our business performance.
Great. Thank you.
Thank you. That was really a multi-element question and a long answer, but perfect. Officially we have only two minutes left. I still see three questions in the queue. If you agree, if you give us an extra minute, we take these three questions. The first one would be from Knut Woller, Baader Bank, and then the next one then from Stacy Pollard, JP Morgan. Knut.
Yeah. Hi. Thank you. Two questions actually, Stefan. The first one to you launched the Data Marketplace called Data Warehouse Cloud, which brings together SAP and non-SAP data. How do you expect this to shape future supply chains and impact SAP's market position in the industry? The second question to Julia and Sabine. Both of you worked, prior to joining SAP, for Microsoft, and there you have already gained a lot of insight into a business model transformation to the cloud. What are your lessons learned, and what insights can you transfer to your new employer and your new roles? Thank you.
Yeah. Thanks for the question. Very quickly on the Data Marketplace announcement, we got very positive feedback. What are we doing? We are basically enabling every company to be a data provider and every company to be a data consumer of relevant business data. We do have initial providers already, like PwC and many others in the HR space, but also you mentioned it in the supply chain space. Just to give you one imagination about sustainability, Thomas talked about it already. Now we can have multiple providers in the space of sustainability actually provide data. Everyone needs data to perform properly. Not all data is provided by any single source.
Now we make it easy because in the past, companies used that data, but that was a month-long or multiple month-long process to get that data, combine it with SAP data, again, because that's the most important data. Now it's really a matter of clicks, and third-party data can be consumed as if it was native SAP data. Thanks.
Thanks.
Sabine, Julia?
I'll jump in on the transformation part of it, if that makes sense. Certainly bringing from big past experience at Microsoft, both on the SaaS transition as well as on the platform transition, I would say the thing that certainly can bring forward and have already done is saying, when you haven't done the change before, it can feel unknown or scary where it's easier for me to say, "No, this is exactly what it's supposed to look like. This change isn't unknown at all. We're right on track, and even though it feels different and new, it is exactly where we should be." In places it feels uncomfortable or a little bit less known.
As an example, many customers, it's not just helping them see the cloud, but really working with them to think differently and how to embrace constant innovation, how to think about more a cloud delivery model. As we, whether it be from a marketing or a sales perspective, our engagement with customers has to adapt to help them educate and learn the experience versus just sell them new capabilities. That's just one example, but whether it be the business model, the product roadmap, or their internal people, having watched and seen the movie a couple times, it's easier for me to say, "Yeah, this is right. This kind of change is different and it feels unknown, but it's actually right on path, and we're exactly where we should be.
Just to add to Julia's words, I think when you look at transformation, if you look at change, transformation is actually change happening at all levels of the company pretty much at the same time, which kind of makes it feel uncomfortable and messy to a certain degree. Actually, that's about right, just as Julia said. If you look at what are the measures of success from also from my position specifically, clearly when you look at sort of getting that clarity, and that alignment in terms of sort of this is where we're headed and that understanding at all levels of the organization around sort of, well, what is it we want to achieve? How do we want to get there?
Sort of that alignment and that sense of urgency and that sort of we want to get it done, and we want to get it done fast. That's one of the things we can really drive through clarity and the objectives and sort of regular feedback loops and really making sure that really the discussions and the coaching sort of between the leadership, and the employees actually really works, right? I guess the other piece, very clearly, culture is huge. Again, going back to transformation happening at all levels of the company pretty much at the same time. It's nothing that you can steer purely top-down. It's something that has to sort of emerge in that tight alignment of where we want to get to. There's going to be a lot of experimentation.
There's going to be a lot of sort of learning from stuff that hasn't quite worked, and there's going to be a lot of personal growth journeys that need to be enabled, so that culture piece and that sort of leadership development around sort of enabling people to grow, enabling people to learn from stuff that doesn't quite work. I think that's the other piece that I can definitely bring to the table there as well.
Thank you. Let's move to the next question, and we have Stacy Pollard from JP Morgan.
Hi. Thank you very much for taking the question. Who is RISE with SAP appealing to the most in these early days? Is it the net new customers? Is it your mid-size customers or your large existing customers who need to convert to the cloud? Where's the most traction coming from? Secondly, if you just look at competition on the application side, when customers are not going with SAP, why is that? Who are they going with, and is it more likely to be a best of breed competitor or another suite offering? Do you think that RISE and Business Technology Platform, are these game changers? Are they going to alter that competitive environment?
Okay, I start on RISE. Which kind of customers do we see? I looked at the order entry now we had in Q1 and the customers behind, it was actually a very diverse mix between the industry, between geos. We had large ones. Otherwise, the cloud backlog would have not increased like it has done in Q1 already. We also had, of course, mid-sized customers who said, "Hey, this is the offering we have waited for to really transform my company end-to-end with you taking me by the hand." That was really mixed. To your other question around when do we lose and for what reason? When you think about that, also a few years back, we, of course, were because we did some acquisitions, and when you are not on one platform, then you have to compete in a best of breed.
Now that we have brought together all of our applications on that one platform, a shared data model, just to give you an example. You can do indirect procurement with one of best of breed competitors out there. They do it quite okay. If it comes to direct procurement, it's game over because no one does direct procurement for heavy manufacturing industries like SAP. Now we have one procurement platform. We have brought it together. In many, many companies, it's a very fluent process workflow between direct and indirect. You procure oftentimes both, and there's one procurement organization. This is where we are now seeing that we have the mojo back of really also not only competing best of breed, where we have very strong solutions, but also getting our assets together in a more best of suite modular approach.
These were, as I mentioned, these were a few reasons in the past that the customers didn't feel that we have our biggest assets together. This is now the case, and this is also where we are now getting the very positive customer feedback we saw at the beginning with the slide Stefan showed. Anything that I missed?
Yeah. Probably only other thing that I would add, Christian, is what we are seeing from the customers is multiple pathways to RISE, which is bringing the diversity that you described. You've got the small or mid-sized company that are looking to try to catapult their ability to be able to compete. They've got the capability, the financial capability to do so, and they're moving very, very quickly. Whereas you've got other companies where they're working maybe on a multi-geography, where they're using parts of their business, they're being able to roll that out, and they'll do that progressively with their public cloud on some of their smaller assets. Maybe then they'll do a broader RISE play for their head office. We're seeing some diversity in terms of the routes that they adopt and also the reasons why they're doing so.
The universal mindset is that they need to be able to transform. They need that transformation as a service, as a way forward. Whether you're small, medium, or large or whether you're doing it for competitive or for reasons to be able to accelerate your growth compared to the competition. It's been pretty interesting to observe those discussions about the outcome being quite consistent.
Thank you. Now we move to the final question. Finally, one question which came in by email. We move now to San Francisco, Pat Walravens at JMP, he has a question to our CEO, Christian. A very simple one. I remember Pat also had the last question on the Q3 earnings call last year. What are Christian's top three strategic imperatives for the next year? Only besides making the numbers.
Thanks a lot, Stefan. What is now very key is that our customers in the pandemic, faced a lot of challenges, and they need to feel that our technology helps them to transform their business. That, for me, is very key. That's always the first. We just had today also another business review, and we looked at the adoption numbers. We looked about how far is the transformation done with many, for a certain industry, and that's for us, very key, so that the customers see the outcome of their investments into SAP. Second, it's about the people. I'm incredibly thankful for our over 100,000 people who have really made it work in such a time to deliver very successful ERP projects, not sitting by the customer, in an almost completely remote way. Also for Sabine.
For us, it's very important. Just yesterday, after I finished my trip to Switzerland, I didn't call it a day, I had an interview with one high-caliber senior executive we would like to bring into SAP. There was this one famous question, "Why SAP?" He told me, "Christian, because I like the strategy. I work for a high-growth, high-value cloud SaaS company, but our opportunity is limited. We are in one market. When I look at the sheer potential of SAP and what you're doing with complete industry, this is why I want to join SAP." Our people are very important, getting new talents in, getting new key executives in. Very happy to have Julia and Sabine on board, but we don't stop there. Third, it's for me, very about, looking at Thomas and Juergen to consistently now deliver innovations.
We did some homework on the platform. Now that a foundation is there, you saw it at Sapphire, what we announced, For me, these are game-changing capabilities to fuel the growth so that Luka and I have a much easier job going forward. When we look about our numbers and the financial forecast of SAP, these are actually, for me, the main three priorities.
Driving growth, I think that's always super important to SAP. With that, we come to an end here. Thank you to the SAP Executive Board for joining me here today and answering all the questions from the financial analysts and the informative discussion. Thank you to all the financial analysts for your tough questions. I tried hard at the beginning, but mine was probably too easy. We'll meet again virtually on our Q2 earnings call, which is scheduled for July 21st, 2021 at 2:00 P.M. Central European time. Of course, I hope to be able to meet you personally again soon. Thank you so much and goodbye.
Thanks a lot.
Thank you.
Bye-bye.
Thank you. Bye.