Hi, good afternoon, everyone, and thank you for joining us at our annual Financial Analyst Conference. We hope you're enjoying SAPPHIRE so far and had a chance to explore all the exciting innovation here on display in Orlando. A warm welcome as well to those that are joining us virtually from around the world. Today's agenda is a great opportunity to hear directly from our executive team, explore key opportunities across our portfolio, and better understand how technology and strategy are coming together here at SAP. Last year, we laid out a framework on how we're expecting to accelerate revenue growth while at the same time driving continued operating leverage. One year later, we're delivering against that vision despite a more challenging macroeconomic backdrop as we operate with focus, scale efficiently, and innovate across our portfolio, with the launch of BDC in February just being the latest example.
We have a great agenda for you today that brings together our executive team to share updates on our strategy, product roadmap, and financials. Let's jump right in. First, we'll welcome Christian Klein on stage, our CEO, to provide insights on our vision and strategy. Then Muhammad Alam, who leads product engineering, will update you on SAP's technology portfolio and walk you through the steps we're taking to drive innovation and growth. Following this, our Chief Operating Officer, Sebastian Steinhäuser, will share how we're executing against our vision, how we're delivering value to our customers, and scale our operations for continued growth. Afterwards, we'll welcome Gina Vargiu-Breuer on stage, Chief People Officer and Labor Director, to discuss how our growth culture is shaping the way we attract, retain, and empower talent across our organization.
Last but not least, our CFO, Dominik Asam, who will provide a deeper look into our financials. A strong lineup ahead that will cover SAP's strategy from hopefully every angle. After that, we'll take a short break, and then all SAP's Executive Board members are here back on stage for an interactive Q&A session. Before we begin, let's start with a short disclaimer. During this presentation, we will make forward-looking statements, which are predictions, projections, or other statements about future events. These statements are based on current expectations and assumptions that are subject to risk and uncertainties that could cause actual results to differ materially. Additional information regarding these risks and uncertainties may be found in our filings with the SEC, including but not limited to the risk factor section of our annual report on Form 20-F for 2024.
With that out of the way, I'd like to welcome Christian onto the stage.
Yeah, thank you, Alexandra. Thanks for joining us, everyone on site, but of course, to all of the people also online. I mean, probably you have seen, I hope so, you have seen the keynote yesterday. You saw all of the exciting announcements, product, but we also talked about go-to-market simplification and got a lot of questions this morning about how, you know, my bad golf performance on stage. You know, my excuse is, I mean, I do not spend my time on the golf course. I have to focus on SAP. That is a good excuse.
Actually, you know, before the teams come on stage, I do not want to steal all the thunder, but I want to give you a bit of a background why we are so confident for about the next years, about the growth, about also about the productivity and the bottom line performance of the company, yeah, to also preach a little bit about what we announced yesterday to the future of SAP, also financially. If you then look at what we announced yesterday, I mean, major announcements have been around Joule. We said Joule will be everywhere. Joule will also answer everything. We made huge announcements around embedded AI. Palantir was an announcement around BDC, the intelligent apps. And for me, it was very important, and that was the handshake what Muhammad Alam and Philip had.
Everything what we are going to show on stage is either real or will be delivered in the next six months. For me, it's very important financially, but also product-Wise that what we promise, we deliver. If we then go into the transformation so far, promising but deliver and execute, I guess we have proven that over the last five years, and it's super, super important that we always keep our promises. When you think back about five years and you saw yesterday the keynote, I mean, behind the scenes when I saw the suite in action, I mean, that is a lot of work which stands behind the financial numbers, which has happened, which is proof of very good execution also inside SAP.
I mean, the BTP, the seamless data module, the seamless integration, where we can now show why is it better to run with a modular suite versus best-of-breed. Of course, all the go-to-market innovations we launched. I mean, first and foremost, Wise, but then also with GROW focusing on net new customers. Everything what we launched around AI is now contributing, of course, to the great financial performance today. We do not want to talk so much about the past and the current status. We want to talk about the future. I want to actually allude a little bit on how will SAP's strategy again result in execution and why can you have the confidence in SAP's performance also long-term, both from a growth but also from a bottom line perspective.
When we pull up our strategy, it's always about four things: product innovation first, go-to-market, simplification to scale the company, and then it's about people. Especially in tech, a lot has to do about people. It is really good that also Gina will elaborate a bit more about what we are doing as part of our people strategy. Everyone in the company is really behind this strategy, and everyone knows exactly what is my role, what do I have to do to further execute on the strategy to make the company win. When we then start with product innovation, I mean, yesterday you heard me talking about the flywheel. I guess a lot of what has happened in the last four years actually brought us to the strong position we are in. Imagine what we explained yesterday on tariffs.
I mean, I have customers talking to me here at SAPPHIRE, but especially also over the last months who said, thanks to SAP, I can react very quickly, very fast, real-time to any updates in the geopolitical market, to any kind of new tariffs hitting the market. What about shipping the products from one place to another place within a certain timeframe to not get hit by tariffs? Or how can I change my production planning to actually avoid getting hit by tariffs also in the near-term future? What about my financial plan, bringing all of this together? What can I say to my analysts and to my investors? It is, of course, very important that you have a system, a solution landscape which talks to each other. That is the integration we have driven over the last years.
What differentiates us today is the flywheel we were talking about, about apps, data, and AI. I do not want to go now into detail into this again, but it is pretty simple. I have to say I am very, very happy that we did not focus so much on all of the hype on large language models, but we focused our energy, our R&D investments on our AI foundation. Our AI foundation is all about business data because we have so many apps, we have so much data, which then at the end feeds into AI. That is why we believe around our embedded AI and Joule, SAP is truly differentiating because we have this flywheel which no one else has. When you go into all parts of the technical stack, we talked about the applications, we talked about the suite.
Just the last hour, I talked to a large, large chemical customer of SAP. They had best-of-breed in the supply chain, and now they see the demand signals. They do not fit to my supply chain planning. The delivery issues with suppliers also now around tariffs, oh, does not work with my supply chain planning either. The manufacturing execution is anyway broken because, again, I have another best-of-breed there. We were just talking about, hey, let's look at your supply chain end-to-end. We do not want to go into shop floor automation, but the west, definitely worth to look into SAP. The iceberg, what Muhammad actually explained so well yesterday, is really hitting some customers pretty hard. That is why I am definitely a believer on the app side. The best-of-breed in the core of any enterprise will win. Business data cloud, I mean, huge.
I mean, we are not telling the customers change your data strategy. What we are telling them together with Databricks is, hey, you have your data strategy and you have a ton of data in one, two, three data lakes. Great. Maybe you removed some technical replication of data, but the data does not make sense yet. That is this one big differentiating factor that we had the courage, again, to change our strategy on the data layer and said, hey, we share our data module. We do it within BDC, and we will really bring the semantics of the data together. Honestly, in all of my conversations, this is the topic number one, and I have rarely seen so much pipeline in such a few months after the launch in February. On AI, I mean, yesterday we shared some exciting news.
I mean, when I now see what we announced last year and we kept our promise and what we are now announcing around really also using the power of WalKMe so that Joule can follow you everywhere and you can take action no matter if you're in ServiceNow or if you are in any kind of other third-party application, and you can always bring your task, your activity into the context with SAP data and then actions in the SAP environment is actually a huge, huge differentiator. Everything what you heard about Perplexity and what we are doing on the answer everything, I mean, this is a unique opportunity as well and will completely redefine how end users will work with SAP software. Here is our suite, cohesive, strong industry flavor. I mean, you see here some of the stats. It's growing very, very nicely.
We see that the strategy of landing and expanding and coming to a second to that is working. Of course, also that we are winning back market share in a lot of the categories you see here as part of the suite. Now, when it comes about the future growth potential of SAP, why do you see me here smiling? I hope you're also going to see the excitement here, but also the confidence when you talk to us at SAP. Our growth formula also for the future is about install base. There's a ton of growth. When we started the Wise journey, I actually thought, yes, we have the two to three X conversion we always talk about. There is much more to it. The Wise journey actually has one destiny, and that is our suite.
Do not forget that when we are converting a customer, the journey continues. I mean, there are new solutions in the public cloud, which the customers still have to consume in order to run a world-class process. The second piece is, of course, about net new. I would say you can challenge us on why was SAP never so successful in the mid-market in the years before our transformation. I see this as a huge upside, and we are seeing this now also in our growth plans for the future. I will come to that in a second. You see that a lot of net new customers just yesterday, I was with a private investor here together from China and said, "Christian, all my unicorns, all the Chinese tech, I mean, we love your portfolio because you can help them to globalize.
They should really focus on their business. Why can you not help my hundreds of hundreds of Chinese tech players to really globalize their business? We are seeing this more and more, that customers turning towards SAP to say, "You know what? When I globalize my business, not only about finance, but also about sales, about manufacturing, about supply chain, let's do it. We help BYD, and we can help any company starting small to become one of the biggest players in the market." That is also about SAP. We have solutions. We have solutions for the mid-market, but they can also then grow with SAP without doing another heavy upgrade on their journey. Now, when we look at the install base, we actually want to describe the growth potential at install base via four levers.
The first lever, when it comes to the move to the cloud, is something what we are really talking about very often. This is about the conversion from on-premise to the cloud. If we can move on the slide, you're going to see that the first lever is really about what is the customer paying maintenance today and how much can we then convert them into the cloud with what kind of upsell factor. You see it here, two to three X. The customers really also love that SAP takes care about the cybersecurity, about the resiliency on the operation side, but they clearly also see that, hey, let's go on the Wise journey, and then we hopefully do the one last final expensive ERP upgrade together.
The second piece is then once a customer has landed, what they are loving is, "Okay, now I'm running the private cloud ERP of SAP, but wait a second. I'm doing with Apple my demand supply chain planning, but it's really a transactional app." When I look into IBP, the solution, the new solution in the public cloud, they see, "Hey, I can have thousands of KPIs which influence my demand. AI is modeling for me the demand and then optimizes the inventory planning for all of my warehouses all over the world." I mean, this is day and night when you compare our legacy apps to the new world. The same is true on SRM versus our one procurement platform.
The same is, of course, true when you look at the SuccessFactors suite from hire to retire into our HCM we are running as part of the private cloud cloud ERP. There is huge upside because the customers, of course, see the tremendous value. When they are continuing the journey, we at least see another 20% upside when they are actually converting from private to public. A main factor is actually cross-selling. I will show some stats that is actually we already got a lot better, but there is enormous potential still left so that we really can run the suite end-to-end and actually expand the footprint within an existing customer of SAP. The last piece is actually, of course, the new product innovation. I mean, you have seen us talking about AI, okay, but we also have BDC.
We actually are also launching every quarter new industry apps also via partners where we can actually further and further expand also our footprint within our install base. You actually see that coming from an EUR 11 billion support revenue stream, we easily believe that we can multiply this with five given all the levers we have. The best-of-breed is working because they see actually that also in the lines of businesses, we have great new innovation with AI, we have BDC. Of course, what they are also seeing then over time is, hey, it's really worth to bet on SAP in the core end-to-end. If you then go to the new customers, I actually find this really, really interesting. That's something what we actually are pushing on the go-to-market transformation this year. We have growth.
It is really inefficient to hunt the millions of mid-market customers with our direct salespeople. While we always had a strong ecosystem, especially on the services side, on the sales side, on the reseller side, so-so. This year, we already assigned them 400,000 accounts dedicated only to our resellers. 400,000 accounts sounds a lot, but it is by far not a lot. I mean, here we are talking about millions of companies which are just waiting to buy and deploy our business suite. We are just at the beginning. Still, when you look at how much revenue did we do on top incrementally only with the net new customers since 2020, EUR 2 billion. I mean, what a number. That is just the beginning. That is not installed. This is really net new.
Yesterday we also talked about commercial innovation because customers are saying some of the commercials you clearly have brought over from a complexity perspective from the on-premise day. Packaging, managed integration, really much more simplified commercials, contracts is super important in a mid-market. We are there. We launched this yesterday. It is almost a no-touch event to move to the business suite with SAP also for a mid-market customer who has not such a big legal department or other supporting functions. Last but not least, what you also see here, when you see how we started in 2020, and you see that actually since then, the net new customers who started with us in 2020 coming from zero, now actually you see how we expanded the business again within the net new customer base.
You clearly see here that over the years, we are growing these customers again with 20% on top because they say, "Oh, you know what? I have worked here here, but now that I want finance with SAP, you know what? I want to have the suite." We are expanding our footprint. Oftentimes we land with finance, and then we replace the Coopers and so on, and they are really wanting to globalize their business with SAP and expanding the footprint. That leads to the fact that, of course, once we have onboarded and won a net new, that, of course, there is a lot of potential still to grab for us in the years to come.
When you look into the up and the cross-sell, another big factor, you see actually that the Wise and the GROW customers who are starting to do business with us in 2020 actually increased their cloud revenue by 50%. That is, of course, upsell. This is also what we have shared with you, that when you are on a Wise journey, you start with, again, with finance or supply chain or HR. The ramp in these contracts, they are massive. You see this every time when we also report our total cloud backlog, how high this number is and what kind of growth we are having there compared to our annual backlog. There is a lot of business which we already signed, which we now need to bring to adoption.
We are working on that extremely well so that we can still actually increase our cloud revenue for the existing customers also in the years to come. That is why with Thomas Saueressig and team, the architects and all of the services what we are actually delivering, that really then makes sure that we are seeing even more upside going forward out of our existing Wise and GROW customer base. It is about the cross-sell. The point is, of course, cross-sell, one thing is product integration. We delivered extremely well on that. We can now offer this as a managed offering, a suite as a service. Now, the one thing is product. The other thing what then you have to make sure is that your Ariba specialists also then say, "Hey, now that you have Ariba indirect, there is also direct sitting on one platform.
Yeah, let's cross-sell. And then when we are done with procurement, it would be actually good that also the order management and the billing is connected to that. We go to finance. First that product, then it's about the go-to-market, integrating the teams, giving them the incentives to go horizontal. Of course, making sure that on the adoption side, we are not working in silos, but that we are showing up as one SAP and say, "We care about your architecture, but we also take care about the business adoption cross-company so that you can run source to pay out of the box." This was a lot of work. Product, commercial, go-to-market, adoption. We are there. The customer is clearly now seeing the benefit.
While there was a bus of people coming from SAP in the past, we need fewer people, but we have a much better cross-sell model. If we then talk about simplification. Simplification is, of course, high on Sebastian Steinhäuser's agenda, but let me quickly allude on how we believe we can become a rule-of-40 company. I mean, the first thing is around sales and marketing. There I would really say our ratios were not best in class. I hope you see now in the recent quarter, you have seen that we are getting better and better. What can we do further to improve the scale of our go-to-market engine? First, channel. I mean, 400,000 customers, great, but there is much more potential. We can really expand their territories for our resellers by a lot.
We can scale with very high margin by giving more and more business to our channel. Second, commercials. I mean, you wouldn't imagine how much time a seller spends to quote, to price. When you look at our CPQ and you look at Gartner, we are right at the right top. We have a world-class CPQ system. We are now infusing AI. We are now replacing some of the legacy. Our salespeople have much more time, 30-40%, to spend with customers instead of working with quoting Wise deals and quoting all kinds of deals inside of SAP. Finally, when it comes to marketing, you can feed a lot of dollars into a marketing machine. You can create a great pipeline, and you can celebrate your pipeline volume every day. It just doesn't matter so much if the conversion is not good.
What we are doing is a lot of work between also, especially our digital hubs to say, "Hey, how can we make the lead conversion better? What are the best marketing channels for that kind of business? How do we address our buying centers in a much better place? How do we also then get better in lead conversion and qualifying leads?" It is a lot going on because every dollar you spend on marketing is a lost dollar if you finally only convert 3% of it. This is, of course, a massive project what we are running inside SAP. Of course, AI taking care about content creation is, of course, a necessary thing to do. On research and development in Muhammad and Philip's space, of course, I mean, we celebrate Joule for Developer here. We see already 20-30% uplift on developer productivity.
This is development. Now we can go into test automation. We go into the delivery side. Of course, there is much more scale what we can gain in the years to come in order to further also then improve our R&D spend. I also want to say this very clearly here. We have a lot of ideas on the innovation side. While I definitely believe that you see a further decrease of the sales and marketing ratio, now we won't increase our R&D ratio, but we won't also now just proportionally decrease our R&D ratio because we have a lot of topics in our core portfolio around AI, around BDC, where we actually feel, "Hey, there is so much growth potential.
Let's, of course, work on the scale and the productivity of our R&D workforce, but also let's invest in the right places. You can also count on us, and Muhammad is actually leading in that, that we're also stopping certain things in the portfolio where we say, "Yes, this is not core, or we are not the number one or the number two." We have these discussions regularly with our leaders to also have actually the right discipline and the focus on making also the right investment, but also the investment decisions. I mean, you saw Agentic AI. While we are introducing this across the company, to give you one example, in finance, actually, in the near-term future, I mean, I set up a lot of accruals in SAP systems.
I did a lot of quarter ends, hands-on in the system, many hands-on DAG to make sure that we can report your compliant numbers. When you see across all of these activities, do I believe that in the near-term future, AI agents will take over this cost? Absolutely, I do. 95%, then there is the chief accountant and the chief FP&A person confirming the numbers. A lot of that will be done record to report, other core processes will be actually done by our AI agents. Similarly, I mean, of course, do we need world-class HR business partners? Absolutely, we do. A lot of the administrative tasks what HR people do from hire to retire is actually will be done by AI agents.
We are, of course, walking the talk, and Sebastian will also talk about how SAP wants SAP, especially with regard to adoption of AI. Yes, Dominik will talk about the rule of 40. We are very, very confident that we, of course, can also keep the promise on the rule of 40. When it is about people, it is a topic which, of course, Gina leads, but it is a topic dear to our heart. You would not imagine how much time the executive board spends on leadership development, on performance management. Five years back, I am not sure where the performance management was, but we reintroduced it. I do not want to apologize for that because at the end, a product can be world-class in a customer project, and then the same product, same code can be a not-so-good SAP project.
In tech, it has a lot to do about people. It's a lot about people with the right mindset. While our customers go through a transformation, our leaders need to understand that our transformation is by far not coming to an end. We have a lot of ideas. We don't want to stand still. I want to see an organization who says, "Hey, the share price in the last two years was great, but we don't rest here. We want to continue. We want to win. We want to win further. We want to win and want to make SAP even bigger." That is the ambition what we have. A lot has to do around people, about leadership, about performance management, and of course, also developing our people. I mean, imagine since 2021, 40,000-45,000 people have joined SAP. That is a workforce transformation.
I mean, we brought in people, new leaders. We brought in people with new skills because we are running a different company. The way how we code, the way how we deliver, the way how we sell, the way how we service, this is a different SAP. Honestly, you need to also shake up the organization a little bit that you cannot be only satisfied with 50 years' success in on-premise. The world continues, and we want to win in the new age. I would say when you look at the SAP today compared to some years back, I mean, I talk about all the people of SAP, and we are super proud about our workforce because in that time, to turn this company around is really a huge undertaking. We do not stop here.
Gina will give us some more details around our HR strategy and the collaboration with some of the top universities, especially around AI also later on. Now, to sum it up, when we talk about the here now and how do we now build our top line and our profitability towards 2027, we have all reasons to be confident. I hope you see when you're walking around Sapphire, I hope you meet the customers who say, "You know what? Finally, SAP has delivered. The best of Sweden is there. Why should I really tackle or deal with this iceberg every day and building this expensive layer on top when SAP can deliver it to me out of the box?" They have all the rights to win in business AI. They did the right thing on the GenAI side by really combining the best of the two worlds.
Finally, we also have the mojo back on the go-to-market that we are not coming in with a contract and ERP upgrade contract, but that we are really understanding the industry of the customer, that we are coming with beautiful demos, prototypes to show, "Hey, when your front office is not talking to your fulfillment function, something is wrong. Just had a customer. Let's bridge that together." Our people need to get this across. That is why continuous learning is also a key element. That is why we are so confident that both from an install base around the 5X growth potential, as well as the net new, we have all the reasons to be confident that the double-digit growth what we are seeing today will sustain for the next years to come. On the operating margin side, I really want to underscore that.
Dominik will present the rule of 40 and everything what we are doing. That starts with the CEO. I am saying I'm the first who want to win and invest in certain places. We all know that SAP is not this highly efficient company yet. You have seen us doing restructuring. You have seen us doing optimization. There is much more what we can do, both cloud TCO, cloud cross-margin on further optimizing the scale, especially of our private cloud solution. There is room. There's room for improvement, not only just because of the economies of scale, just also by improving further the lifecycle management of our operations. Second, in the go-to-market side, you heard me saying what we can do together. Dominik will definitely also talk about the cash flow.
I just want to underpin that this is a team effort, which of course Dominik is leading, but supported by the whole executive board of SAP. Net-net, Sapphire always gives me a lot of new energy. I feel from what I'm hearing from our customers, from our partners, they are very excited. Yes, we are living in uncertain times. The good piece is for this uncertainty, we have always good solutions, answers for our customers. We remain confident for the year, and we remain confident for the years to come. I'm super happy to lead this company. We are on a good track. Thanks to all of you, not only for your attention today, but also for your support and your trust into SAP over the last years. Thanks a lot.
Thank you. Thank you. Is this on? Okay.
I mean, I think yesterday you saw us outline our strategy all from a company perspective. The bold vision that Christian also articulated in terms of how we believe as SAP, we're going to really disrupt and change what business applications mean, the status quo in business applications. My intent, at least in this next few minutes, is not to sort of recap what you've already heard yesterday, and Christian gave an amazing summary of it today, is really maybe explain the why we believe that's the right strategy and why from a strategy perspective, what we have to offer is a unique offering in the market, which I believe we believe that puts us as SAP in a category of one. I'll explain what that means.
It means if you look at the wholeness of the offering, there isn't a whole lot of competitors in each of the layers that you can peg us against to say, "Are we going to win? Are they going to win?" The wholeness are effectively at some ways in this category of one. I also know and I also believe that having a unique offering in and of itself isn't enough if there isn't that ability to execute as well as the intention from the customers to and value to buy the offering. I'll also try to explain why from a point-in-time perspective, we're in unique times where this offering alongside what's happening around us in the world creates this sort of, in some ways, this sort of perfect storm, this magical moment for us to be able to deliver on what Christian just talked about.
I'll explain it from two perspectives. We'll have a customer here as well that will speak to you about that perspective directly. I'll speak about it from a customer of SAP's perspective. From that perspective, I'll take two different views: an outside-in perspective of our customer as to what they're facing and an inside-out perspective of our customer on things they need to address to be able to be competitive. Hopefully that makes sense. I think some of it's going to be a recap, but I'll focus more on where the differences are. Yesterday, Christian started with uncertainty. Let's look at the outside-in perspective of what makes our offering unique.
One of the things, the things that everybody, including us as SAP, are now facing is a level of uncertainty in the world that requires you necessarily to react to it, to respond to it. In some cases, there's opportunities that get created that you need to be able to take advantage of. I don't know if you saw this slide yesterday, but a slide like this to me actually could be very misleading because it makes a CFO, a CPO, a CHRO look like, "Hey, they're sort of in these neat little boxes, and they can individually operate." The reality is that that's not true.
If you take the tariff example that we talked about yesterday, when there is a new tariff in a particular geography, as an organization, as a customer, immediately what impacts them is what are they buying or producing in that region. That is more on the spend side. Of course, that impact, depending on how big it could be, would necessarily translate to the supply chain side to say, "Hey, can I now afford to buy it? Is this going to be delayed? Will the suppliers even ship for me to continue my manufacturing operation?" There is then a very direct impact on the supply chain side. Because there is an impact on the supply chain side, you are obviously not producing stuff not to sell to customers. You have taken orders. You have made commitments.
You need to understand if you can't then produce that, what are the customer orders that get impacted? What are the commitments that you can continue to make? Now you have these three things. You, of course, your CFO needs to know, "Listen, what's the impact now from a financial perspective to our plan, to the guidance that we're providing?" All of a sudden, you at least have four of these stakeholders worried about a single event. Because there could be an impact and you might not be producing stuff or you might not be selling stuff, you need to go look at your workforce to say, "Hey, do I need that workforce still, or do I need to be able to make alternative decisions?" It necessarily then pulls in your CFO.
To be able to answer these questions, again, in the unique times that we're in, you need a solution that allows you to look through this end-to-end context and be able to take that decision. This is where this power of the suite, the suite as a service becomes very critical for our customer and a critical need for the time that we're in. Now, let's take an inside-out perspective, right? We looked at this yesterday, which is most customers today are living in this iceberg that we talked about yesterday. It's not by choice. I don't want to say, "Hey, they made the wrong decision." If you looked at sort of this best of breed versus best of suite choice that customers had, it was a very legitimate choice and a needed choice to make.
If you sort of translate that from what the fancy words are to what it actually means, the choice was, "Hey, do I pick capability over seamless integration?" Capability being best of breed because they were innovating faster and seamless integration being best of suite. That was a real choice because best of suite players like us were not innovating. A lot of customers chose best of breed because, "Hey, the CHRO wanted deep capability here. The CPO wanted deep capability or better experience here." They got into this landscape. Now, the reason why we believe this is going to change is for two reasons. One, this choice of capability versus seamless integration is not that simple anymore.
As SAP with our 35,000-40,000 people, we are committed that in the domains that we play in, in the business suite that we're going to be second to none from a capability perspective. We are investing massively. Christian showed a chart that said how in each of those domains we're gaining share already. I would argue in a good bit of them, we're actually already better than the best of breed that's out in that domain. In most of those domains, if you add up the capacity in engineering we're putting in, it's more than, in some cases, all of the best of breed combined. We are in it to win it.
What that means then from a why perspective is this choice of, "Are you going for capability versus seamless integration?" becomes a pretty lopsided choice because you're going to get seamless integration, but with best of class, best of breed capability, hence the best of breed as a suite. As CIOs now think about that, "Do I want to live in a world that looks like this because I'm spending a significant amount of money and cost in today's world where I can't afford to?
Or do I go to something where I sort of subscribe to suite as a service and get the benefits and then focus on the value on top? The analogy that results very similar in terms of the tech shift that we're going through is if you think about the on-prem data centers, and if you'd walked into any, what you'd see is a rack of servers. If you'd go behind them, you'd see a lot of wires sticking out from here to here, here to there onto the power outlet and so forth. Super messy, right? All of that over the last couple of decades or decade and a half has changed into the cloud. You do not see that at customer locations anymore because what they're not doing is ordering hardware, ordering stacks, and then connecting the wires and then maintaining them.
What they're saying is they just go in, subscribe to a service, and then they start building the applications on top. The layer is still critical but got commoditized. The same way is what's going to happen now in the next layer to the bottom, which is the application layer to say, "Hey, do I need to make all of these connections myself? Or if I can get the same best of breed capability but already seamlessly integrated, that just makes sense for me because then I can focus on the value that sits on top of that stack." Today, that value is real because the belief in AI that it's here and it can create massive value for the organization is for sure there.
That's the inside-out perspective from a customer perspective that as I simplify the landscape, I reduce the cost and the complexity, which the organizations need in these uncertain times. Not just that, I can now focus on creating value from AI for my organization. Now, it's not just cost from an inside-out perspective. There is an imperative. Maybe some organizations can afford to spend that kind of money in their IT organizations. Good for them. The reality is you can live in that landscape, but you can't get value from AI still because AI needs that end-to-end context. If you go back to that tariff example, just like we went through this scenario, if you put a reasoning model that needs to understand, "Hey, impact of tariffs on your business," it needs to go through that logic and that cycle that we talked about.
OtherWise, what kind of recommendations it's going to give? It needs to know this commodity in this category for this pen translates to this set of manufacturing orders that translate to this set of customer orders that translates to this in our financial plan that translates to this amount of workforce that's working on this thing. And that traceability, this knowledge graph is not something you can manually create because if you have a disparate landscape, you're taking the data, dumping it somewhere, and then trying to spend millions stitching it together. And maybe the AI can still give you some information, but how are you going to go take action? Because you need to take action. And to take that action, then you need to create even more, connect more wires to be able to go do that. That's just unsustainable. Hopefully that logic makes sense.
That is why I fundamentally believe that from a value perspective of this strategy, we're in a category of one because if you look at the suite that we have, the context is this wide, right? It goes from finance, spend, supply chain, ATM here. At the application layer, there aren't many, if any, maybe there's one that can provide you that end-to-end context. Others are very sort of narrow single-lane providers, maybe two lanes at best, but they're not going to go that wide. Even if they can and somebody wants to go to best of breed, at the highest fidelity level, this financial data and supply chain data is unique. You need that to be super high fidelity.
You can't directionally be accurate on your financial data or directionally be accurate in your supply chain data for AI to reason over it to make a suggestion because then you're going to be in a world of hurt in not too distant future. If you look at it from that perspective, I would argue that then we're in a category of one. The need is there from an outside-in perspective for our customers and from an inside-out perspective for them to take value. The times we're in are unique because they need to take advantage of AI. OtherWise, their competitors are going to outrun them. They need to be able to reduce costs because the times are uncertain. What we offer then resonates.
Hence the growth that we believe that we're seeing and we believe will come is something that we believe is real from that perspective. Hopefully that logic makes sense because when you go from this to the flywheel, that value then just gets unlocked for our customers. Now let's take another couple of minutes and keep going through the layers as to even in the layers, each of the layers we believe we're unique. On the whole, of course, we're unique. Hopefully that's just now very intuitive for you as to why this strategy of suite as a service best of breed is not just a strategy that we've cooked up in a room in Walldorf. It's what our customers have been telling us, and that's what they want, and that's what we're delivering from a product perspective.
Some of them are doing that already. Let's sort of go through maybe from the top down on each one of these. From an AI perspective, again, we've established that outside of maybe, "Hey, if you're writing a performance goal, generative AI can help you sort of write that goal." Those kinds of single-lane use cases from a productivity perspective, anybody can do, right? Those would be available everywhere. The value from those is going to be far less compared to the exponential value that truly takes out cost or risk or increases your top line when you can think end-to-end.
The end-to-end context in AI that our AI provides in knowing the data set, having the right permissions to it in an out-of-the-box fashion, and knowing which part of the business process that data context sits in natively to be able to make a reckoning, inference, a reasoning over it to say, "Hey, this is the right thing to go do," and not just stop there, but then go in and do the right thing because it natively is pre-integrated with the suite. This process is unique. If you want to do that with a, let's say, a workflow provider, for instance, or a platform services provider, they have the tech, the tools to be able to go through these four steps.
What it leaves the customer with is, "Hey, I need to sort of now provide and plug the data into all of this." Not just the data. If I'm not on the suite, I need to first merge the data together, create that harmonized data model, then pump it to this model with the right permissions because now the permissions are disconnected, right? The data sits somewhere else. You've harmonized it. Not just that. Now I need to figure out if the model tells me I need to take this action, I need to now go connect it and make sure the model—if the humans were that smart, they were doing that already, then why do you need AI for it?
That is the unique value prop in AI, what SAP provides compared to a workflow provider that goes to a customer very conveniently and says, "Hey, you got the tech. You can just use this. You do not need to change anything underneath it." You can do that. There is a cost to it that in some cases is more than 10x in being able to deploy yet another layer to complicate your landscape. You still will not get the output even if you do that in the age of AI with the higher reasoning model. In AI, the fact that we have the data and the context, again, puts us in a category of one. That is why we see at our door so many knocks from our tech partners and others to say, "Hey, let's do agent to agent.
Let's do this collaboration." Because, of course, the majority of the high, precious fidelity work happens in SAP landscape. That's the AI side. I won't go through the announcements because hopefully you guys have all seen it, but there's some really cool stuff here. We've got a lot of customers, blah, blah, blah. On the data side, how are we unique on the data side? How are we in the category of one in just that layer? Now, you can think about the data layer in two basic—it comes from two centers of gravity. One is the data itself. Who are the producers of data? The second is the data platform providers. Who's got the best tech to do something with the data, right?
In the producers of data category, of course, we exist because our applications create some of the data that you need as we establish in the tariff scenario. That's the most end-to-end and highest fidelity. We would compete with, let's say, a Salesforce. We would compete with a Coupa. You might compete with a Workday as we established. While they're also producers of data, the data they produce is very narrow lane. They're either single lane, in some cases, maybe two lanes, but it doesn't cover the lanes that we do to create the end-to-end context. In the data producer center of gravity, we have a unique position for the reason we established. Now, on the data platform layer, you can argue there's maybe two sort of very leading players there: Databricks and Snowflake.
The hyperscalers are trying to do some amazing things with Fabric, with AWS, and BigQuery as well. Outside of that, I think the list is long, but the traction sort of tapers off. Now, if somebody were to stop me and ask me, "Who's our competitor in BDC?" I would say there's nobody because what BDC provides is a combination of data because we're a producer of data and the world's best data engineering platform, a.k.a. Databricks, in one offering. As a customer, you don't have to make two choices and then bring them together. What you get is the world's leading data platform with the data that's most precious, highest fidelity for you. Not the only data, but at least the ones that have that characteristic that everything else sits around to be able to sort of create that offering.
That is the traction we are seeing in the market that Christian talked about. No product, I think, in our history has had this amount of pipeline and traction already just weeks after launch. Every single customer is seeing that value because it is unique. It brings those two things together that used to be individual lanes, but this is the only offering that brings it together in a one and a seamless, highly integrated fashion. You can see some of the opportunity and the traction that we have on the data side.
Because it's so unique is why on the other side of our door, the line is even longer of partners knocking to say, "Hey, listen, we want in from a partnership perspective because if we can take our data model in Adobe's case, which is what we announced yesterday, hook it up with yours, we can do some amazing things." This for us makes sense because we're not that deep in marketing. Adobe is clearly the leader. Let's bring the things together. The supply chain plan gets enriched because now they have demand signals, and the marketing plan gets enriched because they know what's there in the supply chain side.
This way, not just that category of partners, but all the SIs are lining up to say, "Hey, listen, now that we know what we have trust on the data and the data model, let's build insights on top of it." These partners, this ecosystem in BDC is so critical. What you're going to continue to see is this list continue to get long and long because the ones we have on the list are far as a fraction of the ones that we're working with to actually get them on the list from an interest perspective.
As that happens, anything that gets built on BDC drives the BDC flywheel, not just from a number of customer perspective from an acquisition standpoint, but from a consumption perspective because ultimately BDC is about, "Hey, the more sort of you use the power and unlock the power of the data, the more value you create for you, and we take a share of that value from a customer perspective." Finally, on the application layer, again, I have established this. I will not beat this dead horse because I want you to now hear from somebody else as well besides just me.
In the categories of app we play in, the context, the lanes we play in, again, we believe we're in a category of one, largely speaking, of what we offer end-to-end in market share leading products that cover them that now seamlessly integrated out of the box and are in best-in-class from capability because a customer doesn't have to then choose that, "Hey, listen, if I want seamless integration, let me compromise on features or let me compromise on experience." Because what we're not saying to the customers is, "You have to go use this." We still want to earn the right to be able to do the suite in a composable modular manner, but because it's the best thing you can find in the market, and that's what we're after.
You see that in the tractions and the growth rate market share that you see in our products. Finally, the layers and the applications are awesome, but at a customer location, they'll never be complete. For that, we have a business technology platform that allows you to extend the application layer that natively understands your model, hooks in through permissions and so forth. With BTP and Joule Studio, which is what we announced yesterday, you can create AI cases that are unique to you on SAP landscape, but also extend to non-SAP as well. It gives you that enterprise-wide view from Joule Studio standpoint. Certainly on the BDC side, we have the partnership with Databricks that allows you to bring SAP and non-SAP. The extensibility in each of the layers is, again, world-class. It's not just about the tech, right?
We talked about the business transformation suite. We need our customers to get there successfully in the conversations, at least I'm having mostly at this conference. It's not about, "Hey, does the strategy make sense?" It's about how quickly can we get there. This is where you see our transformation suite that's landing amazingly well. You see that manifest itself in the two journeys that Christian talked about, and the customer stories that are lining up that validates that, "Hey, it's resonating for them." Now I want to invite one of these customers on the stage, Schneider Electric. Elizabeth Hackenson's here, who's the CIO of Schneider Electric, to share with you all her story and Schneider's story around their transformation. Elizabeth, welcome.
First, on behalf of Schneider Electric, we're really honored to be here.
We've been on a journey for quite some time now, and we started in, I guess it was 2018, where we made the decision to move our North America businesses to SAP Private Cloud. We most likely had our first implementation. It's hard to think back five years in 2002. In 2020, 2021, we needed to think about what we were going to do with our European businesses and international. While we were happy with SAP Private Cloud, we were very intrigued by what is now known as SAP GROW. At that time, we also recognized that we were probably experts in customization. We loved it, especially in our ECC instances. We needed to change, and we wanted to be future-ready. We realized that maybe the technology could be a forcing function for us.
We believed that with the public cloud. It took some cajoling at the top with many of our business stakeholders. We did make the decision to go all in with SAP Grow. I'm happy to report that we do have at least one factory on Grow. We will have a few more this year. Next year, we will have our full first country end-to-end order to cash on Grow. Also this year, we made the decision to upgrade what we were doing with SAP Public Cloud. We moved to Rise. That was about a month ago for a North America business, pushing about EUR 7 billion in revenue. It was a significant upgrade and migration for us over one weekend. We also have a number of our very complex factories also running on Rise now.
Thank you, Elizabeth.
I mean, I think two parts of this story that I think are extremely both validating for us that you're getting value is one, the choice of public cloud, our growth journey, and private cloud to make sure that we're there in a journey that makes sense for the customer, I think is immensely valuable. Schneider's doing both because it makes their transformation a lot more accelerated and real for them. The fact that, hey, with this journey, they're looking to sort of melt the iceberg that's under the water to be able to sort of free up the operational efficiency also shows up. Listen, why did you choose SAP? I mean, you have a lot of choices, and certainly we talked about best of breed, and there's a lot of options out there, but why SAP?
One word, trust.
That stems from we had a very long-standing history for about 20 years, and so we trusted SAP. Even when we looked in the marketplace before we made the decision to go public and then, I'm sorry, private and then public, we did not feel there was any competition, frankly. The trust then when we were making the decision for GROW was really important because we knew that we had to co-innovate, that GROW was still a maturing product. We had lots of conversations, and Christian, you were instrumental with Jean-Pascal, our CEO at the time, that we were going to trust to build something together and to co-innovate.
That is what we have learned in the last two years with your team, and we are grateful for all the work you are doing as we, number one, we have really changed our business processes to adopt fit to standard. That has been a big move for us. Together, we identified some gaps that other big manufacturers like us would need in the product. You have been, again, with your team, really fantastic in looking at those features and building them into the product. That is where trust comes in, right? We are trusting you that you are going to continue to help us do that. Hopefully we provide you trust in that we are asking you for things that are super important that also other manufacturing companies can leverage as well.
Yeah, no, makes sense. I think just two things I would highlight in what Elizabeth said.
Hopefully that resonated already. One is, and I didn't talk about this in our unique offering, but that's a bit self-serving for me to say. It's awesome to hear that from a customer, is the fact that the customers trust us on these processes to run these mission-critical operations because we are global. We comply with localizations in the world like nobody else does. We have the network and a bunch of different capabilities. That gives us that implicit advantage that if you're an SAP, your business will run because we've been doing it for cross industries for the largest customers for so long. The second part of it is, listen, she's also highlighting this fact that as SAP, our journey to building these second-to-none applications, the best-in-class applications requires this level of collaboration.
We're happy to take feedback and collaborate like this because it makes our product best in class. What we don't want to go do now is sit in a room in Palo Alto or Walldorf, come up with features, and then wait for customers to go use. We want to have a customer telling us, "Hey, this is important." We validate that other customers can use this too, and then we build that together. This, to some extent, has been the DNA of SAP going back to Hasso because there are stories about how he would walk into a customer location and not just meet with the executives, but the end users, sit there and look at how they're using it, and then go fix the product to make sure it actually meets their needs.
That's what we're seeing with GROW, which is really exciting.
Another reason why we went is we really wanted to take advantage of the two feature drops per year. Even working with you now as we're coming up with these gaps, we're not waiting five years to get a feature. It's within six months or we're going to see it in 12 months. That's really exciting for us as well with Grow, is we'll keep that future ready. When we made the decision in 2001, to be honest, I mean, how many people were really talking about AI at that time? Not a lot. Now we know you're making all that AI investment, and we saw it here in the announcements, which is great. We feel really poised and ready to go and very happy we made the decision back in.
Awesome. Now you're in the middle of the transformation.
Some successes already, some soon to come. What messages and takeaways do you give to other customers and peers of yours that you talk to that, "Hey, when you look at a transformation like that, do A, B, and C?" I know the tool chain that we talked about, our business transformation suite's also playing a role in your journey. It might be awesome for this group to hear about the learnings that you have, the feedback you give to others, and how you're using the tooling to accelerate your migrations.
First of all, we treat all of these projects right now as business transformations and not IT projects. That's how we used to look at them. When I say business transformation, it's like we're co-leading with our stakeholders.
When we think about what we're doing with RISE and with GROW, we have dedicated people from the customer representation on how do we order, logistics, manufacturing, finance, HR. They're part of the team full-time, and that's really important. They are defining what the business processes are, not IT. We're also big users of Signavio, LeanIX, WalkMe. That's super important as we plan any of these projects, especially we put a lot of those tools in the hands of our stakeholders. We really worry less about the technology, to be quite frank. That was something when we used to go into hypercare, there was always a lot of tech type of issues we needed to address. That's not happening anymore. That's been a big aha moment for us too, that in hypercare, it's mostly about, did we get the training right? Is the change management effective?
Data, data quality. I would offer that, one, be bold because I've had a lot of your customers come to us. I'm here with one of my colleagues, Gogita, about how did you really make that decision with GROW? It was a bold decision, right? I don't even know that there was any other industrial our size who wanted to do this. I feel you have to, if you believe in something and there's trust with your partner, then make the decision, make the leap of faith. We have been super happy with our decision. We have a long road ahead of us because we still have to implement both RISE and GROW across the rest of the world and many of our factories and distribution centers, but we feel super confident.
T hat's awesome.
The final question, Elizabeth, speaking of the road ahead, I know this suite message resonates as well. You guys are looking at potential expansion sideways now that the core is either on RISE or GROW. Maybe you can share in a quick few words, what does that look like for you?
What it looks like for us is we're a company that we bought into the best of breed. We're relooking that right now because with best of breed, as we look at, do we really get the value out of it? There is the whole integration ecosystem that we're very excited about, what was announced yesterday. We have to start to rethink some of our plans because we have to simplify as well. We have a lot of applications that are still in our ecosystem.
The only way to get simpler is to create solutions that give us more of an integrated end-to-end framework.
Suite as a service. Thank you so much, Elizabeth. We really appreciate it.
Thank you.
With this, I'll welcome Sebastian Steinhäuser to share about our operation story.
Whoo. That's how I went on stage yesterday. That was the first noise that came to my mind when thinking of the pressure. I think Elizabeth also just talked about my team faces every day with some very demanding business stakeholders to make all of that what you just heard about business data cloud, new commercial models a reality every day. Luckily, I have a technology provider who was just before me on stage who provides us a lot of tools, not only to accelerate strategy execution, but also to simplify SAP.
Let's look a bit deeper into our internal transformation and how SAP runs SAP in that transformation. Before I go there, I want to be absolutely clear, and Christian already said it, and you heard it from Dominik multiple times in the past. We are absolutely committed to increase our operating efficiency. We are absolutely committed that while our revenue should grow like this, our cost can only grow like this. That's what we committed to you, 80-90% cost growth compared to revenue growth. That, however, is differentiated by function. You heard Christian say this already. In sales and marketing, we are absolutely aware we are not yet best in class. I will show you in a deeper, deep dive today how we will actually bring down cost and increase efficiency. On R&D, it's all about a measured approach.
Of course, you heard Christian and Muhammad say we will double down and continue to double down on innovation. We also do not want to be in every line of business, have more people than all of our competitors combined. Efficiency, of course, is key here as well in finding the right balance. Looking into G&A, of course, this is the homeground of SAP. This is where SAP runs. SAP comes absolutely to life where we continue to grind from an already, I would say, strong basis, continue to grind on the efficiency, all of that using our own technology and especially our own AI. It is not just about technology. What we have done is we have set up an incredibly rigorous, disciplined transformation program across the company.
Not only the transformation program is set up across these three pillars, my entire team, a big part of my team across operations, IT is organized around these three pillars to continuously drive this transformation. It is not a one-time effort. It is not like a one-year program. It is a continuous program where we track about currently 500 structural efficiency measures in a stringent governance, all business-led, but also continuously identify new measures, especially with the opportunities AI gives us continuously to unlock new efficiencies. Now, let's go into each of the three areas one by one, starting with sales and marketing. Looking into the room here, some of you have given us some feedback in the past, and we had some very robust discussion on sales and marketing. This is absolutely a core priority for us.
We have already in the past significantly increased productivity in our team, but that's not enough. That's why in early 2025, we've rolled out a much simplified go-to-market operating model covering literally every aspect of how we go to market. This will not only allow us to unlock efficiency in 2025, but continuously. What have we done? We have simplified, first of all, our buying center setup. Christian already talked about cross-serve. We have simplified our engagement models. Where do we go direct? Where do we go indirect? Where do we let the partner drive the business autonomously? We have simplified and doubled down on adoption, treating it with the same discipline as booking new business. We have simplified and strengthened our focus on ecosystem to scale better. Of course, throughout, we have used tools and automation from SAP to increase efficiency.
Now let's do three deep dives together and cover the other two quickly upfront. When we talk about adoption, what do we mean? Of course, simply put, every dollar you can retain and don't lose is a dollar you don't need to book, and it's a much more effective cost of customer acquisition motion. That's why next to, of course, ensuring the customer success, also from a sales efficiency perspective, adoption and consumption is absolutely key. What have we done? All of our salespeople now, based on strength and telemetry, have very strong adoption incentives in their bonus plans. We have tightened up significantly our customer success operating model across the company, moving a bit from wild, wild west to a much more streamlined way of how we drive customer success.
We are providing enterprise architects to all of our RISE customers that, of course, help them to adopt our entire suite. When it comes to the ecosystem, Christian already touched about it. We are really doubling and tripling down on our seller partners to really allow them to drive business much more autonomously than in the past, covering much more ground without adding direct sales capacity. On our services partners, of course, here the focus is on aligning on the methodology, on the tool chain arond what RISE is supposed to be. You heard a lot about that yesterday and today. Software vendors and technology partners are, of course, then complementing our portfolio. That is adoption and ecosystem. Now let's double-click into the other three areas, starting with the buying center setup. You heard Christian Muhammad talk about the SAP business suite.
That's not just a product vision and a product focus. On the go-to-market side, first of all, we've simplified how we package our portfolio. By other times where you buy a bomb that's like this long. That, of course, makes it much simpler to sell and implement and much more cost-effective. Second, we have added strong cross-sell incentives to all of our teams and our partners. What Christian, the example gave, is, of course, it's much more effective if an Ariba seller uncovers already the next cross-sell opportunity. Finally, we have also clarified who plays where across our specialized sales teams, across pre-sales, post-sales. How do we actually work the buying centers? How do we engage with much cleaner rules, overall leading to much better upsell opportunities, serving the customer better because they better understand how we serve them with much more efficiency.
Second, and that's at the heart of our go-to-market transformation, we have significantly simplified our entire engagement model. First of all, we introduced a very clean, first-time at SAP market segmentation. Of course, in enterprise, that's where we do direct sales to our most valuable accounts. What we have done is actually we've moved a significant number of accounts into what we call the corporate segment. Here the focus is on digital selling and selling through partners. Most importantly, what we have introduced new this year is what we call partner-driven. In every market unit of SAP, you now have a partner-driven segment where there's no seller from SAP engaged. Basically, we enable the partner through tools, through automation, through enablement to sell without SAP.
That leads us to cover significantly more accounts than in the past in a very efficient way of engaging with the customer. We did not stop here. We did not stop with an engagement model. What we have also done is we have cleaned up and clarified the role concept within SAP. When we went into this transformation, let's say summer last year, we found about 40 role profiles, and they were often not aligned across regions. Now we have significantly less than 20 aligned in one blueprint that we use in every region with clear coverage ratios, clear assignment rules, and a lot of discipline. Talking about regions, we also reduced the number of regions from seven to four. That does not only give us efficiency, but also better scalability in the expertise we can provide.
What this gives us, in my perspective, is not just a good model for 2025, but this really lays the foundation to, from here, constantly optimize how do we assign resources, how do we optimize this year over year over year in a constant grind. Next up on our go-to-market transformation, how do we actually use SAP in that? I gave that example yesterday in the global keynote, similar to what you heard from Schneider. We are also, as one example, introducing a two-tier architecture. You heard about our big focus on partner-led business in the mid-market in the corporate segment. For that, we are also introducing a completely new runway, a greenfield implementation of the SAP business suite, 100% standard, absolutely clean public cloud with significant benefits, not only for IT.
Of course, there's zero customization effort, but for the business, what we are providing is a zero-touch process, taking about 20 days out of the time we typically need from customer interest to get an order form approved and making that an entire autonomous process so that actually a customer can go into SAP for me, transact through a partner without even engaging with SAP. That's really a significant lift. To give you just one example here, on a typical deal today, even in the mid-market, we often have a dozen or more approvals within SAP on a single approval cycle and 50% of redlining on those deals. With this new architecture and business process that we are currently starting to roll out, we move to zero.
That, of course, gives us significant efficiency both in our sales teams as well as in our back-office teams, finance, legal, while providing actually significant benefits to the partner who can transact faster and to the customer. Christian said that they do not need any lawyers anymore. One transaction, it is a fully standardized contract. From there, you can just transact and transact and transact, all of that powered by the power of a fully integrated SAP business suite. That is it on go-to-market. I hope you can see we really drive a comprehensive agenda. By the way, none of this what I am showing here is generated for you. This is what we presented at the go-to-market kickoff meeting. It is fully rolled out to our teams. They are all enabled on it. This is real today. Now, let us move over to research and development.
Looking at R&D again, it's absolutely clear I'm a customer, so I want Muhammad and team and Philip and team to invest into innovation as much as they can. Still, we are absolutely focused on, at the same time, driving development efficiency. What do we do here? Muhammad and team have significantly clarified the operating model, providing a GM-led model. Every line of business you see on our sunshine, that somehow continues to grow every time I see it. Every line of business has now a general manager driving the business end-to-end, aligning all SAP functions. We have clarified what a typical development team should look like, what are the roles? A product manager, an architect, a developer, what are the ratios, healthy ratios? They're implementing that throughout development. Second, we've cleaned up our developer tools and harmonized them.
We are bringing all of our developers on one harmonized developer tooling landscape, and all of that is managed through LeanIX. Third, and you heard Christian on cost of cloud. On the cloud operations side, we have consolidated a big part of our cloud operations team to really further, through a centralized approach, drive down cost of cloud. Of course, also in development, we are using tools and automation, Joule for developers. We have a measured productivity increase on the productive coding time of 30%. That is what we have tracked with our own thousands of other developers using the tool every day. That is before talking test automation and all of the other benefits we can go to. Let us move to the third functional area. It is not moving. Let us talk about corporate functions.
In corporate functions, basically, we are set up into finance, so Dominik's domain, HR, Gina's domain, people and culture, and operations, which is my domain. In finance, you heard Christian say it, the focus is absolute on driving continuous automation on leveraging AI, but also BDC to significantly and continuously lift productivity. One great example, we have trained Joule to speak all of our commercial policies. If you know SAP, they are probably, they can fill a nice big room to actually support our salespeople in generating contracts, but also our finance people in improving contracts, providing significant productivity uplift already. That is just one of many, many use cases in finance. In operations, we have centralized all of our operations teams. We used to have COO functions in every part of SAP, leading more to disseparate kingdoms.
We have now centralized these teams and with that, not only had a lift in efficiency, but also much better alignment now in how we execute our strategy across all functions. Of course, Gina will talk about it. We are heavily using our own technology, also in her domain, in the people domain. For example, we just generated all of our employee goals with Joule, which does not only lead to efficiency gains again, but also to better goals that we are providing to our people, which lead to better outcomes. This is also where BDC has a massive impact across workforce planning, financial planning, sales ops, sales planning, where we have seen actually 60% efficiency increase. That is not yet talking about better insights. It is just talking about faster insights since we went live on BDC as customer zero.
Of course, across all of these three pillars, across the entire program, we have a dedicated focus on leveraging our own business AI. That means, A, standard AI that Muhammad and team are shipping, as well as then everything that's custom built. We actually mandated our own tech AI foundation on BTP that we are using for custom AI, overall tracking several hundred million in AI-powered efficiency increase across the company. That's not PowerPoint numbers. That's numbers where we have circularity with Dominik into our budgets across all functions. To close it off, we are also eating our own dog food on how we manage the transformation itself. Actually, many of our meetings don't start anymore with PowerPoint, especially when talking about simplification. All of our processes are mapped and optimized in Signavio.
Our entire IT architecture is actually detailed, specified, and designed and evolved in LeanIX. We are introducing now WalkMe for much more faster and better change management. This is really the toolchain we are using to drive our simplification project internally. For example, the two-tier runway I just talked about, we are introducing. We could do so at a significantly reduced implementation cost because all of it was before we actually paid the first SI to do anything. We designed it completely, the 2B process in Signavio, the 2B architecture in LeanIX, and handed that then over for implementation. Those are not the only tools. Our entire program is tracked to 500 measures in Business Data Cloud. That's where we look at it. We look at it regularly in board meetings, but also then functional management team meetings, workforce plans.
We are not just ensuring that we have efficiency measures in place, but that then we are also hiring the right profiles in the right places that the transformation sticks. Gina will probably talk about that a little more. That is also happening in Business Data Cloud. Of course, with Cloud ERP, we are running on RISE. We are ensuring that we have circularity of these measures back into the budget so that it really becomes a constant efficiency improvement. You have my commitment, you have our commitment. We will continue to make this transformation stick. We will continue to increase operating efficiency. With that, over to Gina.
Also, welcome from my side. I mean, I would love to build on what my colleagues just said. We are actually at a pivotal moment, how we call it, because technology, especially artificial intelligence, is really reshaping complete industries, but also the way we work internally. We absolutely believe that people remain actually the true catalysts of innovation. Sustainable success depends also on the way we integrate people, technology, and culture. We are talking about the power of the triad because this is actually what drives growth and also resilience for organizations. We at SAP are really embracing that shift with urgency at the moment because actually not just to keep up, but we would love to lead, and we would love to stay the number one. As the world around us is also accelerating, we also have to accelerate.
That really is actually dependent on the ability how we empower our people, how we are also building the right skills. You will hear me talk about skills a lot in this presentation and also how we are evolving our culture because we are disrupted from the outside, and we have to make sure that we stay resilient and that we have a strong culture because this is the backbone of our success. That also requires much more than just technology because it requires a culture and also a workforce that is built for agility. That is what we try. Resilience, extremely important, and even more important, continuous reinvention because we can never stop innovating. This is also true for the people side and for the culture side. SAP's culture always has been the cornerstone of our success for more than five decades.
I think we have always proven that we are able to transform over and over and over. Now, as we move into our new chapter and as we also move into the AI first, suite first world, our ability to innovate and to execute fast at scale and also with the right skills becomes the true competitive advantage for SAP. We are competing and winning also globally based on our growth culture. This growth culture is embedded in our North Star principle, what we call is best is never done because this is the innovation mindset we would love to instill. This goes back also on the founder spirit. We just translated that one into the new context. It's also embedded in the way how we lead, how we develop, how we deliver. This is actually across all levels of the organization.
We have, beginning of last year, we have started evolving our culture. We have also looked into it. I always compared it with a sports metaphor. When you play golf, for example, you have a coach, and the coach is always correcting a little bit how you put the head, how you have the knee, how you have the arm. You also have to unlearn certain behaviors, and you might also have to add some techniques so that you're getting better and hitting the ball. That's exactly the same what we did with our culture and our newly evolved growth behaviors make it real. The first one is we win as one, and I think Christian also hinted to that in his presentation. It's extremely important that we are working together, that we're innovating together, but that we are also lowering the silos inside of SAP.
Taking charge is important. It has to do with empowerment, with taking accountability, driving the topics, and also being accountable for your own results. Acting with transparency is extremely important, that we also have a very healthy, yeah, debate culture. It is important that we are then also moving on and that we are also acting with compliance at all times. Embracing curiosity, this is actually very much related to best is never done because if you're not curious, we're not learning. We have to constantly learn and learn and learn because skills are actually sort of the lifetime of skills are getting down, and we have to make sure that we keep our workforce employable. That's why curiosity is so much important and ingrained also in the new growth behaviors.
This is our operating system that makes us actually fast, resilient, and how we call also future ready. It is not so much about the culture frame. It is also very much about how we activate and ingrain it into our daily doing. I will also speak about it in a second, how we do that. We really would like to create also business impact with the right culture we have. Our growth culture is the execution foundation for our AI first, suite first strategy. You can see that it goes across. This is not something that is driven only from my area. This is something the whole board is standing for, and you can see it every single pillar we are driving and delivering. It also increases our execution speed, innovation, and also decision making because people take accountability. We are acting with transparency.
Information is there. You can grab it, and that makes us much faster. It also enables financial growth, and Dominik will also speak about that. It also helps us to attract also the right talent, deploy talent, and also scale talent across SAP worldwide. That shift is actually a deliberate acceleration we took last year, and this is very backed up by clear KPIs and even more important, a very long-term workforce vision as well. When you look at our people agenda, I always say this is the acceleration foundation for our transformation because without people, the best strategy is nothing worse. That is why the people agenda is actually how we bring out the best on every employee to unlock growth, drive excellence, and also stay relevant.
This is extremely important that we stay relevant and that our employees really stay current with their knowledge, with their skills. I have three pillars and one foundation, and I will also deep dive into the three pillars. The foundation for everything is how we call it is the people-centric work environment. This is where the sense of belonging is created. This is where employee well-being is established, and this is also where we are living inclusion and also diverse workforces. The second pillar is actually we would like to transform SAP into a skill-led organization. It's called killed People Ecosystem. We have game-changing people technology because we just heard it also from Sebastian. Without technology, it's very difficult to transform into a Skilled People Ecosystem and our growth culture where I will also speak about how are we activating that.
With that, we are also building an organization that leads through change and is also actually adaptive because people are talking about, "I'm tired. It's really difficult. Why do we drive more change?" This is actually natural. You cannot stop it, especially in our tech industry. We have a high speed of change. Our job is now to say we have to build an adaptive organization, and that's what we do. Using our AI-powered insights and also our own HCM solutions, we are also driving that transformation actually from the inside out because with that, we are also creating the best industry reference because the same as Sebastian, I'm also customer one or customer zero. I would also say that the people strategy and the business strategy has never been more interwoven than today.
Now let me also go a bit deeper into three core aspects of the people agenda. I just said it. By 2028, we would love to be a fully skilled company where skills and not roles define how we hire, develop, and also deploy talent across the organization. This skills-first approach, how we call it, ensures that every employee's personal growth is actually absolutely linked also with the company's growth and strategic priorities. We have also just shifted the way we are assigning learning budgets into the hand of every employee because it is important that we are steering in a strategic way what people learn and how they learn. When you also look what skill-based means is that we are infusing skills into every single element of the employee lifecycle.
With the skill lens, we actually are able to tap into a larger pool of talents inside and outside SAP because with the skill lens, you are really walking away from hiring for only degrees or only experience. It's about the skill currency. We are also getting much more transparency inside of SAP, whom do we have in the workforce? We can leverage that also when we are recruiting inside and outside. We also spoke about strategic workforce management. We are enriching now strategic workforce management also with a clear skill lens. It has to be skill-infused because just looking at how many headcounts do we need in which country is by far not enough anymore. The roles are also not enough anymore. We really have to go down to the skill lens.
We are also enhancing internal talent mobility with a skill-led organization because same effect as for recruiting. I think that we are more able to find people for the jobs internally, and that also enhances the way we are developing people internally and also increasing the ways we are developing. Skill-based also enhances the way we learn because we can use AI. With that, you have highly personalized learning journeys. This is only possible if you have the skill lens of the employees. The latest is also that we say we would love to gain much more transparency into our own succession pipelines because the skill lens is also helping. We have AI also in our succession module, and that helps us, AI-assisted, that we are comparing skills of successors. With that, we can also compare the succession candidates in the succession pipelines.
Only possible because we are applying now the skill lens. Last but not least, and this is also very important for us, we are also having a higher employee engagement because people are more satisfied because we can offer much more learning, training, development across SAP. With that, we can also reinforce our own employer promise, bring, build, and belong, how we call that. We are definitely not waiting until 2028 to transform. We have already started, and I think Sebastian spoke about that. When you look at the chart Christian was talking about and also Sebastian was talking about, the way we were driving our transformation and restructuring program last year was already driven with a skill lens and a very clear strategic workforce plan. It was a workforce transformation. Yes, we reduced 10,000 jobs, but we were also building up 10,000 new jobs again.
We used it very much to build and infuse new skills into SAP, especially when it comes to customer-facing roles, core engineering roles, AI, cybersecurity. We have hired three times more AI engineers in 2024 than we did in 2023. That alone shows how we are really using the complete workforce transformation NLT program in order to shift workforce and invest in our growth areas to support our business strategy and that we are able to deliver everything what we showed actually during the past two days. Extremely important. I also would like to highlight that we also shifted our internal workforce. It was also that we are upskilling and reskilling and reassigning roles and skill profiles to our internal employees because this is absolutely equally important. Last but not least, we are also now moving very much into that skill-based strategic workforce management.
We are working on the global strategic location strategy because it's very important that we are securing the talent supply also from a skill lens, that we are also having the right balance between high cost and best cost share, and that we are also having a kind of de-risking when it comes to geopolitical resilience. We are also going ahead with full speed so that we are really fully skilled in 2028 because we have started in 2022 already to design the global skill taxonomy because you need to have a global language. We need to have to understand, okay, what are the future skills so that we're not reassigning the old ones that are not driving the transformation. That's why we have now established a global skill taxonomy with 1,500 skills. We came down from 6,500. Also here, simplification was kicking in.
We were absolutely driving that down, but with relevance and future readiness. Extremely important. By mid of this year, 80% of our employees will be assigned to new skill profiles, and we will be able to have 100% assigned by end of the year. This also unleashes actually AI personalized learning journeys and growth, what I was talking about before. For this, it is absolutely essential to have our own growth portfolio from SuccessFactors in place because you need to have that in the system. You need to have the link to AI; otherWise, it is extremely difficult to do that. Last but not least, we also just laid out a learning goal that we said we would love to have as an ambitious goal to say, okay, 15% of the time of our employees should be actually invested in learning.
This also shows the urgency that we say, okay, how can we keep our people employable and give also the time to invest in learning and development? I think we are pioneers also in the skills revolution, and we are also shaping that skill-based approach. With that, we are also establishing a very modern work environment. We have spoken a lot about our own technology, so let me talk about a bit more. Of course, we would like to lead, and we would love to be our own best customer. We have also implemented now the SuccessFactors modules. I'm also driving that. Going forward, I was also on my roadmap, but it's important that we are also using our own HR innovations and that we are also boosting productivity also with our own AI solutions.
Talking about what I'm already implementing, we have currently 50 AI-driven HR use cases. Many already are in productive use, and a couple are actually in advanced piloting. That includes Employee Central. Sebastian talked about GenAI-assisted goal setting. We also have dual digital assistance in SuccessFactors. We have AI-assisted skill matching, what we're using in the recruiting space because AI is able to extract the skills in the CVs and then matching it also to the job descriptions. What I mentioned before, we also have the AI-assisted succession management. That is comparing the nominated succession candidates with skills, performance ratings, and so on. It is also important that we are also driving efficiency with AI also in the HR space. One space I said, Employee Central, shared service environment is of course one important application area.
With Joule, we expect actually a 30% efficiency gain for navigations, transactions, and also information retrieval. We are also expecting that the ticket volume is going down by 35% by using Zoom. We already mentioned the goal setting, AI-assisted goal setting that was actually leading to an 80% time saving for our leaders. When you're listening into the organization, actually the feedback was fantastic. The managers love it because it's much easier now to set goals and also the development goals and the performance goals. Joule is also able to provide actually context around HR policies, answering questions, and also offering personalized recommendations. We have more than 145 scenarios, and out of that, 150 are also available on mobile.
When you look at SuccessFactors overall, we have more than 178 HR use cases already in use for our customers externally, and we will also adapt more and more internally. Last but not least, I also would love to touch a little bit on how we are activating our growth culture because, as I said before, driving transformation at SAP requires much more than a vision. It is very important that we have a very robust execution architecture that really enables us to scale at speed and with adaptability. We are activating our growth culture in the so-called growth culture activation program that will run until 2026. It starts at the top. It starts with us as a Managing Board, but we are also tackling it down for the L1, L2 leaders.
In total, we are touching more than 2,000 leaders in that one year in order to drive the transformation, in order to also embrace the new mindsets, the behaviors, but always with the lens of how can we get faster in implementing change and transforming our businesses. We are also investing a lot actually in the buildup of our change agent networks across regions and functions. We also have so-called growth summits at our 25 biggest locations. That means this is available for all our employees, and we will touch more than 10,000 employees also by end of the year. It is important that you have a critical mass, that you have a peer-to-peer influence platform so that we can really scale the change across SAP. Christian mentioned it.
We are also implementing our new performance management in a very systematic way because it's important that we're driving accountability and that we are also building that high performance culture. Let me sum up. Our people strategy is the foundation of our transformation. It scales innovation. It also accelerates productivity and also builds a future-ready workforce. We are actively building the future with a skilled people ecosystem, with a growth and performance-focused culture, and a tech-enabled decision-making environment. This is actually how we are driving business performance for people and culture. With that, I would love to hand over to Dominik, who will guide us now through the financial strategy. Thank you.
Good afternoon, everyone. It's great to be back here in Orlando at SAPPHIRE. I was thinking back to my early innings in my professional careers when thinking about how to communicate the financial plan. I used to be an investment banker, predominantly working on M&A projects. What I hated in a due diligence when there was a management presentation was when the guys were only showing me the future and the hockey stick of the future. What I always felt is extremely important is really to be super surgical and granular in the actuals to understand where this thing is trending and finding a kind of steady extrapolation base for the future. Please bear with me when I look a little bit in the rear mirror before I go into the future. First of all, it's clear that there were some objectives set back in October 2020.
This was a very radical change Christian has been driving, and there was quite some skepticism in the early innings about whether it would be achievable to hit the numbers that were set out for the year 2025. We felt it's a useful exercise to look back and compare the numbers that were communicated back then, quite a while ago, with what we have now in our outlook. Let's start with the cloud revenue, which is of course the driver of our future. The original ambition for 2025 was EUR 22 billion, and then we divested Qualtrics. That was a major divestiture. Now we are guiding towards EUR 21.6-EUR 21.9 billion, which leaves a delta mathematically of EUR 1.6-EUR1.9 billion. Now, those who have followed this very closely will say, "Dominik, be careful.
There was an exchange rate delta. I think back then it was 114, and now the constant currency exchange rate is 108. Yes, there were some puts and takes and minor acquisitions. We divested Litmos. We divested Pioneer, and then there were some tuck-ins. No matter how you do the math around these sensitivities, you will figure out that there is a very significant outperformance on top of these puts and takes that we had there. We can, I think, check off that one. If you move it to total revenue, and that's actually a little bit surprising, the total revenues were actually even benefiting more. Qualtrics' divestiture took out EUR 2.3 billion. The update implied was EUR 3.7 billion.
It is interesting to see that basically the outperformance on the total revenues was kind of coming from both ends, both from the software side and from the cloud revenue side. By the way, the EUR 37.4 billion is not an official guidance. What we did here is we took the official guidance midpoint for software and services, sorry, for cloud and software, and we added an extremely conservative services number to be sure that this number is kind of achievable. A well-secured EUR 3.7 billion upside. Volume is one thing. Now, you could be skeptical and say, "Okay, have you bought growth? Have you been sacrificing the profitability to achieve that growth?" Also here, the answer is no. We have been actually able to add about EUR 1.3 billion to EUR 1.6 billion. The fall through on the incremental revenues is quite healthy.
It's actually higher than the average of the business we had guided. It is accretive. It is accretive also in terms of margin. Where we have been kind of spot on is on the free cash flow. I know there was a reset on stock-based compensation, which was then also triggering some questions. On the other hand, in the EUR 8 billion we have this year, there is about EUR 700 million restructuring still. I think we have been also honoring the commitment on free cash flow, but it was admittedly the tightest number to hit. To cut a long story short, I think we can say that we walk the talk. We say what we do, and then we also do what we say. Of course, it is our combined ambition to continue on that track record going forward. Now, let's start with the more surgical exercise.
Here you see a so-called Sankey chart, which I think we've shown before, where we use this a little bit as a structure of our presentation to simply run through the financial statements like you run through a spreadsheet to build the economics here. What I wanted to do to really bring this famous mix effect across is the following. I want to talk about the mix of a cocktail. You have in a cocktail, you have some alcoholic stuff, and you have stuff that's diluting the alcohol. What I felt might be useful is just to look at what is really there that's driving our growth. You would not be surprised to learn that Cloud ERP Suite is driving all our growth. More than 100% of the growth since several years is coming from Cloud ERP Suite.
That's the good cholesterol, so to speak, or the alcohol in the cocktail. You see the ratio of that good stuff in the cloud revenues is going up and up and up and faster and faster. You see that we moved it from a 2x ratio now all the way up in 2024 to almost 5x ratio. It's actually true that if you take the net of the extension suite and the declining infrastructure, the service business, that's kind of flattish. This will not change in 2025 much. It's kind of not moving the needle. It's about how can I make sure that the overwhelming share, the fast-growing share of the cloud revenues is Cloud ERP Suite, and then I will be very good on growth. Now, let's move it to the total revenue side. There is actually the even more dramatic story.
This super high-octane good cholesterol is just reaching 0.7 of the stuff that's kind of stagnating. Actually, the other, the non-Cloud ERP Suite has been declining slightly over these years and will continue to do so going forward, maybe even with a slightly faster decline. Here lies the beauty of where we are right now. We are really at that inflection point. If you think about an S-curve, there is a kind of humble beginning. The humble beginning of an S-curve is that you have small doses of the good new stuff, which are starting to grow. They start moving the needle. They become bigger and bigger. As they grow bigger, they move the needle massively. If you then have converted everything, there's not much left. You plateau out again.
We are right now at that sweet spot where this super valuable high-growth portion of that cocktail is reaching that kind of steep part of the S-curve. This is what I call the mix effect. We are currently running at only 0.7 if you divide the revenues in Cloud ERP Suite against all the rest, which is stagnating or declining. The other way to do the same math is to really go on the more recent past and look at the buckets of growth in 2024. You look at the disclosed kind of sub-lines of revenues, and you look at the growth rates. Then you simply take a spreadsheet and you pull these numbers to the right by three years.
If you did that, I'm not saying that's the right thing to do, but just as a starting point for thinking about it, you'll come to a 3 percentage point acceleration every year in the total revenues because of that cocktail effect I'm just describing. Now, that won't happen like that. We have to be clear that, yeah, on support, we will see an acceleration of decline. And yes, will we be able to kind of fly high at 34%, 33% Cloud ERP Suite, or will we kind of normalize a little bit? Yes, let's take that into account. But if you, and you follow us very closely, you just do some reasonable tweaks on the same logic, you will see there's plenty of degradation possible in the sublines of this revenue mix without jeopardizing our hypothesis of accelerated growth in 2026 and 2027. It's just the mix effect.
The other question that a lot of you have is, well, are we not running out of steam with this conversion story? We came to the conclusion there is a little bit of a misperception that we are a one-trick wonder on converting installed base to cloud, and when that is over, the whole story will stop. I hope we gave you a lot of qualitative arguments with all the products we have in the pipeline that, well, we think that we can sustain market share gains. Still, let's focus on that topic. If you look at the EUR 11 billion remained to do in software support revenue, there is about two-thirds still which are affected by this end-of-maintenance, mainstream maintenance in 2027, and then completely out of maintenance by end of 2030.
That's, by the way, in terms of mix, not very different from what we've seen in prior years. The reason why that's the case is that we also added some S/4 licenses, and S/4 is also converted strongly to cloud. It's not only that the ECC and older is converted, it's also S/4 that's converted. I think this is a very interesting chart. Now, if you look back again, and you are very surgical on how has that maintenance space evolved over these years from 2020 through 2024, the first important observation is it has actually not changed much. The famous gas in the tank has not really been used to a large degree. Why is that happening?
First and foremost, we did sell about EUR 10 billion worth of licenses in that period, which at the typical ratios for support give you a couple billion more. You recall that with the inflation going up for the first time a couple of years ago, SAP started charging inflation. We were taking prices up with the cap of inflation, and in some countries it was lower and some was higher. That gave us a little bit of an increment. Yes, even we at SAP, we do face some churn. Sometimes customers are leaving the system. You see that here depicted. I can give you some indication here. It's about a 3% churn that we are facing in terms of the rate we have there.
The move to the cloud is actually not so dramatic because while we have signed a large share of contracts in RISE, they're all starting these transformation journeys as we speak. You had one example on the stage here with Schneider Electric, which, by the way, had a great share price performance. Hopefully that gives us more credibility that we work with the right customers that are on the kind of upward trend. They have kind of had twice the performance of their benchmark indices, I think, in that five-year period we look at here. There are some other smaller factors which are very technical in nature, but you see they're not so material. You know we always say that kind of cloud extension, as we call it, converts into cloud revenues at a factor of two to three.
The way you can think about it is if you really did an apples-to-apples comparison and take the precise on-prem functionality and convert them, lift and shift to the cloud, it's maybe more 2x, but even at the signing of the initial RISE deal, our salespeople are able to cross-sell already a little bit, and we move it up to the 2-3x. It is basically 2-3x of a cloud extension volume of roughly EUR 1 billion. That is about EUR 2-EUR 3 billion of the cloud revenue. There is a lot of other stuff in there. Christian already mentioned there is a couple of billion coming from really new customers, but there is also the fact that we move from the expansion in the portfolio, 9% of the portfolio having four applications or more. Now we move it to 23%.
Still 77 to go. As we are successful with this best-of-suite approach, we are recovering ground from these niche competitors and integrate them. That story is not a hypothesis that will come at some point in time, but it's something that's happening already for the last year. This is why I was so much insisting on kind of being surgical on the history for the extrapolation. Our story is not about some magic acceleration anywhere. It's all about sustaining what we have done over the last two, three years. The other way to triangulate is more coming from, I'd say, what I used to do when I did some venture capital stuff, which is thinking about what's the market potential. I mean, how fast is the market growing?
There was very recently some announcements as to what different buckets of our segments would deliver in growth in the market in the cloud. We quote IDC here, "If you mix that, the way it's as consistent as possible with the portfolio you see on that screen in the cloud, we think the addressable cloud market is growing at 17%." You know we are flying much higher than that on the cloud revenues, and if you need cloud ERP, even higher. We are very low in the penetration of that market. We have a 20x relationship between what we generate in revenues in the cloud expected this year versus what we see here as an estimate by IDC.
When we look into these models, I go back to my Excel spreadsheet logic of extrapolating, we see always this kind of deceleration down to a terminal value growth in the outer years of a forecast period in some models. Now, that's completely in contradiction to that. That would mean massive market share losses. Think back to my cocktail. As in this cocktail, there will be more and more cloud revenues. We are actually asymptotically converging towards a model which I would describe in very simple terms, take more and more towards 100% cloud, and then you deduct some dilution of growth to services, minus some dilution from some very residual niche special cases on software. This is not really limiting us.
If you have a hypothesis of us sustaining market share growth or sticking to the market share we've achieved in three, five years, if you're skeptical about us, I mean, it's clear that if you then on the one hand, you extrapolate from what's happening in the last years and in the near term, and you look at where is this asymptotic kind of growth area where this company should end up, there is no reason why there should not be further strong growth rates in the mid-teens for quite some period of time beyond. The good thing is we see a lot of research where some of you even argue, these 17% might be a thing of the past because there's so much value created in AI. And then is it five percentage points more every year, or how many do we add on top?
Let's not even kind of skin that bear before we've killed it. Just to make a long story short, no matter whether you take a very granular extrapolation view or you take like this kind of market view on what type of conversions to the market SAP might get to, it's a very consistent triangulation to get you to similar, sustainable, very significant growth levels. That is, of course, super important because when we come to the margin, it's all about the operating leverage we can bring to bear. We have done a lot of heavy lifting over the last couple of years. Sebastian has been super instrumental in that and has explained the myriad of initiatives we are doing on that front. If you then look at this in a kind of more simplified way, I like to talk about this kind of operating leverage ratio.
How much has the cost base grown versus the revenues? The truth is, in the early innings of this decade, we had to invest very heavily in transformation. We degraded actually the margin. With the outlook we gave for 2025, we're actually back to the margin level we had before that reset. The good news is now we have the company on a completely different growth trajectory and on a sustainable operating leverage trajectory, which allows us to grow the cost base more slowly than the revenues. That's not new. I apologize for some of this stuff being boring, but I hope that while all the product stuff should be very exciting to you, it's not so bad if you're pretty boring on the numbers and deliver what we say again and again, and it's 80-90%.
It has been much better in the last two years because of the heavy restructuring. It was painful. It was, of course, not something that we will like to do in a repeated way, but that one-time reset was important. Gina has explained very well the reskilling that was required. We think the 80-90% are not only what our competitors are doing. They make a lot of sense. We can again triangulate and look at benchmarking outside, high level, top down, and then we look at all the measures we have. It sounds easy, but do not forget that 66% of our cost base are personal expenses. The good news is these expenses are knowledge worker kind of expenses, which we can tackle with AI. There is inflation.
Especially in this country, we probably need to think about inflation, what can happen there. Already prior to these risks, we've seen like 4.5% global merit hikes on average for these types of companies. If you want to kind of reach these ratios, you have to bring actually quite some significant productivity to bear in this universe of knowledge workers. Now, I would like to show you one tiny example. I think Sebastian has shown you the whole program of stuff we do, but we didn't want to leave you go without showing one very specific agentic example of how we can drive efficiency. With that, I would like to step out and ask for this kind of film to be moved quickly.
Let's start with how AI agents all come together in Joule.
When we go to the Explore tab, you can see how end users can choose to enable more expert AI agents for targeted interactions. Joule is the orchestrator of these AI agents. Let's see it in action how the AI agents help business users eliminate tedious work to focus on what really matters. In this example, we're looking at a customer experience agent that communicates with the customer and a cash flow agent that orchestrates the whole flow. These agents work seamlessly within the SAP system and in the background with Microsoft Copilot. As you can see, I just got a Teams notification with an urgent customer problem. A company was billed for renting drilling equipment, but unfortunately, it arrived a few days late. However, the agents have come up with a solution to resolve this and suggested two goodwill gestures that I could also offer the customer.
Before I agree, what I want to do is find out what's going on in the background. I am going to select review and see the original mail that they'd sent us. I can see the AI also tells me what the agents did. They laid out a plan, read the customer's email, retrieved information, created a dispute proposal, and many more steps. To see the invoice, we can jump into S/4. I want to understand concrete next steps, so I ask Joule to tell us what's actually happening. The collection agent talks to a customer service agent, to the financial accounting agent, and then the shipping and receiving agent is also contacted. The final recommendation is displayed, a process that would usually take hours automated in just a few seconds. With Joule, we can also see the logic, the reasoning, and the sources.
I even get two alternative suggestions. That's fantastic. I think I know what to do. I accept the resolution and select goodwill option B. Again, our agents work together to do all of this, creating an email using an LLM. This being said, the human always has the final say. Now let's look at the dispute case that has been created in the system. The disputed amount of EUR 6,148 has now been settled, and the dispute is closed. What a success. After making sure our customers stay happy, I need to take care of addressing the issue caused by my third-party shipment company who did not deliver on time. What can I do about this? I can ask the AI to find out what I should do. Our various agents make this a very simple activity to perform.
They tell me that the issue that occurred clearly violated our service-level agreement and recommend that I should open a dispute case. In only one click, I can get the dispute case opened and simply send that off to the shipper. There you have it, put very simply, agents working together for a better resolution. A process that would usually take days or weeks to complete has been solved in just a few minutes. That's super powerful, and that's what we focus on with agents.
Yeah. Why I like this case is that it shows that it's a productivity tool. I mean, you've seen how fast the thing goes as opposed to tedious exploring and then executing several transactions.
I'm deeply convinced that the chap in the shared service center who does that today would not jump to the exploration, how can I get my money back from the supplier of the logistics? They won't do that because they're busy and they're happy to have kind of done it. Here, it's kind of so much stuck in their face that they should go chase the supplier that has screwed it up. It's a nice combination of productivity gain, but also superior insights, which is easily executable. We can create more value for the business by making sure that the money we lost because of the late shipment, we can reclaim from the culprit. Now I come to the split of that kind of operating leverage. Sorry, again, I'm boring. I say the same thing.
We are not willing to go into exact detail where we are going on different parts of the P&L because we want to keep the room for maneuver to be agile when things change and adjust. I think the 75% gross margin in Q1 was a good testimony that on the gross margin, we have been making huge progress, but it also means the air is getting thinner. I would say that the lion's share of the margin expansion in that formula, 80-90%, is coming more from the OpEx. There you see that still we believe that on the selling expenses, it's where the biggest fish can be fried to drive the sales ratio down. On research and development, we still see some improvements and also in admin functions.
That is the kind of pecking order, the ranking in terms of where the biggest opportunities lie to further mature the margin. It is becoming relatively tough, frankly, on the gross margin with the extremely fast growth on the rise. The air is getting thinner. Of course, there are still some opportunities, but we are more optimistic that it will come out of OpEx. Now, the final piece is maybe the most complex one, which is the free cash flow discussion. As you all know, in the end, if you think about discounted free cash flow, it is that that counts. It is the cash, and it is the compound of the revenue growth, the operating leverage, and the margin expansion as a result of that, and then the conversion down to the bottom line.
I have to admit that the last years have been kind of difficult to follow for people because it looks like a roller coaster. I wanted to give you on that chart actually a nicely depolluted margin where we take the restructuring out and then add the kind of discontinuation of factoring, and we also take care of the fines we've paid. My accounting folks have said, if you do that, Dominik, you can start reporting that every quarter, which I'm not intending to do, but you can do that. I will take you step by step, and then you can do that on your side. We had in 2024, EUR 4.2 billion of free cash flow on a non-IFRS operating profit of EUR 8.2 billion. In that, we're at EUR 2.5 billion of restructuring expenses, which again, we are not contemplating to do every year.
In that, a couple of hundred million for fines we paid because of the DOJ investigation, South Africa, and a couple of hundred million residual flushing out SAP-induced vendor financing, which is basically selling receivables. Recall we have done some of that already in 2023, but we've finalized that in 2024. If you add all that up, that's EUR 2.9 billion on top to come to a kind of underlying rate. If you now ask me if I distill the logic out, what's the easy formula to come for the years in the past and the more recent past and also the future to a free cash flow? It's to start with the non-IFRS operating profit. Not surprising, it's the biggest driver of free cash flow is how much profit you make. Second thing you have to do is to deduct the taxes.
We have been giving a guidance that, in the mid to long term, we think about 28%-32%. We have been a little bit higher because of some reasons we explained in detail over the last couple of years, in particular withholding taxes when we had the restructuring, we were falling into loss-making territory in Germany. Not surprisingly, tax affected EBIT to start with. There is one piece missing which we need to take into account, which is the delta between the P&L on stock-based compensation and the cash. That was EUR 1.1 billion in both 2003 and 2004. My indication is do not expect any wild leaps on that. It will continue to be around a EUR 1 billion delta. We are not talking about P&L or cash out, but the delta between the two will continue to be very roughly around EUR 1 billion.
The formula I would apply if I was in your shoes to simulate what the free cash flow should be in 2026, 2027, 2028, and so forth, would simply be to look at the operating profit, take that kind of range of tax rate off, and then add EUR 1 billion back for that delta between stock-based compensation. Isn't that great? That's so easy. What is very difficult is the bridges year on year with all the phasing effects. I'll give you one example of what is difficult. In 2024, we had that big restructuring where we're falling into losses. There is a big delta between what we show IFRS and non-IFRS, which has created some turbulence in taxes. We basically created a kind of a tax shield. On the other hand, we had withholding taxes which hit us.
The tax shield from EUR 3.2 billion restructuring expense, which is not in the non-IFRS, sorry, in the non-IFRS operating profit, tax shield on EUR 3 billion plus is about EUR 1 billion. We also had some non-recoverable withholding taxes, so that was eroded a little bit by that. That has to be embarked somewhere in the cash flow. I can give you the guidance that we are still benefiting from tax loss carry forwards in 2025. It is a little bit of a headwind from taxes in 2025, which is kind of something you could also consider against the EUR 700 million restructuring expense you should take care of. There might be phasing topics on stuff like transformation credits, but that is again a pure phasing topic.
Whatever we spend there in early years will come back in the later years because it's the P&L versus the cash, and it's a pure phasing mechanism. I'd say over a longer period of time, using that super simple formula will get you, from my perspective, the best estimate you can have on that final step, which also means that, frankly, the improvement on free cash flow from now on will come very, very largely from the revenue growth and the compound using the margin expansion. How does it now all tie into the story that Christian already alluded to on that famous rule of 40? Again, rule of 40 is not magic. We do very granular discounted free cash flow. It's just to make the point that we need to balance the growth and the free cash flow, the profitability.
If you do that math for 2026, say, and then also in the future, you see that there is probably some gap. We will probably end up with a reasonable estimate in the mid-30s or so. There is a gap of five percentage points or so you have to still cover beyond. If we are not giving you any precise guidance, I mean, the least arrow square estimate is to say, why don't I take half of that from growth and half of that from margin expansion? You see that we need to kind of improve on both by a percentage point or so for several years in a row to get there. That is the kind of framework. Now, how quickly that really goes in the current macro environment is dependent on a lot of factors.
When we are growing or containing the cost growth at only 80%, of course, it will come faster than if we are only containing it at 90%. This is the framework, and this is why the logic of just extrapolating, grinding, doing what we used to do, of having a nice house in a nice neighborhood, a neighborhood where the market is growing at 17% in the cloud, we do not see why this should not be a reasonable ambition to get to that type of level. With that, I tried to basically give you the financial model in a nutshell. Now, the use of cash, quite straightforward, nothing exotic on that. Sometimes there might be opportunities in more difficult times to bolt in further acquisitions. That is the first question. We also have to compare that to repurchasing our own shares.
I mean, there is also good obtain in our own shares, as we tried to explain today. We can't tell you today what we will do on that front, but it is definitely a tool we might be willing to use if the right occasion arises. If then beyond that, there is still significant cash left, we will continue to do what we've done in the past, which is returning the cash to the shareholders. We have a EUR 5 billion program still running, which we will complete throughout the end of the year. I think it's a good opportunity when things are a little bit more iffy to continue doing that. Again, nothing revolutionary on that front.
We will continue to have a strong balance sheet, work prudently, keep the flexibility for M&A tuck-ins, but clearly will not hoard cash for the sake of hoarding cash, but return it to shareholders. That gives us the overall picture that you saw in Christian's part. We closed the loop here, so to speak. We have a resilient business model. We do not need miracles here. We just need to continue grinding, doing the hard work that we have embarked on. We think we have a great product portfolio. You have all seen it here. I hope the tire kicking was useful. With that, I think we are now breaking to get a little bit of a rest and then reconvene in 10 minutes, if I am not mistaken. I think we are still exactly on time, more or less, although that should work. Okay. Thank you.
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One, two, three, rise with SAP. Alternatively, this is on. Check, check.
Okay, welcome back. On stage, we have SAP's Executive Board: Christian Klein, Dominik, Muhammad, Sebastian, Thomas. Thank you for joining us as well. And Gina. We have covered a lot of ground today. I am sure there will be plenty of questions from the financial community. Just as a reminder, if you would like to ask a question, please raise your hand and a mic runner will come over. As always, we kindly ask you to limit yourself to one question. With that, let's start with Mo.
Great. Thank you for the presentations. Very helpful. I had a couple.
Maybe if I can start with Christian and maybe for Muhammad as well. Feedback on BDC on the floor has been, you know, really outstanding and potentially sort of a game changer for you. You talked about this sort of combining the best of suite. I thought it was a really good analogy versus the best of breed. You also laid out the opportunity to kind of cross-sell and upsell. How big of a driver does this become over the medium term versus just the sort of S/4 kind of upgrades? How quickly can you unlock that? Second one was for Thomas, please. You know, we've heard also from the floor that the availability of system integrated resources is a big bottleneck.
You've obviously got the deadline with the 2030, but I know you talked about certain complex customers getting a bit more time to potentially make that move. Do you think that this is something, you know, that can be potentially sort of extended more broadly? Also, what sort of pricing uplift are you expecting kind of on a, you know, on a kind of regularized contract, please? Thank you.
Yeah, I can start with BDC maybe from a business perspective. Muhammad, you give all the highlights from a product perspective. I mean, look, these days uncertainty, just to give you an example, when you are a CFO and a CEO and we have Q1 earnings, you need a lot of data to run through a Monte Carlo simulation to give us various scenarios to be able to tell you what is going to happen with our guidance.
In the past, in Sebastian's camp, you had round about 200-300 very expensive data scientists going into, you know, different sources. Sometimes when we acquired, we had, you know, products like Salesforce, which we did not like, but we had to work with them for a certain while. It was always this, you know, okay, how to get the data together. At the end, you are making very important decisions. Or when you take Gina, I mean, it is all about skills, but we need to relate the workforce plan to the financial plan. I mean, for me, this is an absolute game changer. Not only, you know, for a CIO who can save a ton of money for having, you know, all kinds of data integration solutions, all kinds of data lakes, they can really build this virtual layer.
What they love about it is, of course, that they even do not have to change, you know, their existing data lake strategy because BDC will sit on top. Last but not least, think about that. What Muhammad announced from an LOB perspective, the intelligent apps. I mean, when I am a seller for SuccessFactors and I sell against Workday, I mean, come on, employee productivity, workforce, financial plan, skill management, you actually get, you know, external inflation data for your compensation planning. I mean, that comes now out of the box and every CHRO will love it. For me, now we can repeat that for the supply chain officer, et cetera.
From a business perspective, I'm not only expecting that this is a huge revenue driver on the BW space, you know, so the IT layer, but definitely will also drive a lot of business in the lines of businesses. Indeed, the feedback is super, super good. Mohammed, from a product perspective.
I've got a mic. I mean, I think so. I'll add just maybe two quick things. One, while the migration and the upgrade from ECC is very important to us, with the GROW and the RISE journeys, the reality is customers aren't waiting for that to happen to make decisions on the LOB side. We intend to make sure that we in the LOBs, we want to go win in, we don't lose a single deal on capability or commercial offerings because as SAP, we can go do that.
On the basis of earning that business from that perspective, because that is really what allows, if you remember from the keynote yesterday, customers to sort of melt the iceberg. That is what is on top of mind for everybody. Not just that, it amplifies the value of BDC because then it is more end to end as opposed to just one part or two parts of the suite story. For us, it also then gives us an ability now with the intelligent apps that Christian said that if you have SuccessFactors, we have an amazing people analytics app for you to also get value from. It gives us a cross-sell within the LOB and certainly on the sideways as well.
From an innovation and a product focus perspective, it's just extremely critical for me and my organizations, which is why I think last year, if you remember, and even this year, we've talked about AI first, suite first as our strategy. That's why we have two firsts, not just AI first, because to amplify the value, suite first is critical. All of our investments are very much focused on both of these to light that up.
Also to the question about the, on the one hand side, SIs, what you mentioned, the SI capacity, but also the second part of the question for the S4 move, respectively, the timeline.
I mean, first and foremost, I think that you see basically a shortage of SI skills is because we see an acceleration of the S4 moves and the huge wave of projects we see, especially also with RISE with SAP as a vehicle and accelerator to all of that. That's what the entire ecosystem is benefiting from. If you analyze the P&Ls of some of the SIs, you clearly will see that the SAP business is the biggest and fastest growing of the SIs. That's basically a testimony to the success of RISE with SAP, but also the massive move to S4, which is a positive in that sense.
To a point, how we tackle that one, I mean, what you also have seen with Muhammad and Philip, we significantly invest into also AI with Joule for consultants and Joule for developer, quite frankly, to compensate that on that front. What we for sure have as an ambition is to reduce the project time and cost, quite frankly, leveraging AI, leveraging our integrated toolchain, which I have showed in the morning keynote, because fundamentally we can scale faster. It is not about making the SIs happy with more utilization they sell, but actually using tools to accelerate these moves. That is what we do. You can be assured if you think about a traditional end-to-end project with GenAI, test script generation, test automation. If you think about a project documentation, all of these phases will be embedded with AI.
We are very bullish that 35% is already a conservative number of how much we can drive down the effort and with that cost of projects. With that, we can cover more customers overall to do that move. We consider that a huge opportunity in that vent of AI to drive the acceleration. That is the one part of the question. Secondly, to that point, what we clearly also see is that we have some super large customers. Let's take a concrete example, actually. Bosch. Bosch is using 350 productive ERP systems. That is what they do. They fully go to RISE with SAP, fully embrace the cloud, but for sure, to migrate 350 systems till 2030 might be a challenge. What we, because we are very customer oriented, basically worked out is to see, because we cannot extend the maintenance period. The 2030 is not an artificial date.
It's a date which is founded in the technology reality that ECC is based on NADB and has some technology components where we cannot extend the maintenance. What we now set for these customers as a kind of insurance, if they cannot make it by 2030, because all the customers have this ambition to do it by 2030, we will, within RISE with SAP and the change of some of the technology components, be able to provide the security and patching for this till 2030, 2033 in that sense, as a kind of period to do the last couple of systems. By no means that means that anybody will postpone the journey because they have this ahead of the curve, because for sure we don't want to see any slowdown and the customers don't have time.
For such a scenario in Bosch, this gives them the vehicle to get into their timelines. As you pointed it out and signaled it, for sure, this is something where we certainly will see an uplift as well from that. Because for sure we also need to maintain this cold line a little bit longer. That is certainly something where for sure we see an uplift as well in that sense. Absolutely.
Yeah. Can we take the next question from Michael?
Thanks very much. It's Michael Turner with Wells Fargo Securities. Great content. Appreciate you hosting. I'm curious if you can speak to the tone and the type of conversations you're having with customers this week.
We've referenced fluid environment, what feels like a long time now, but it's also maybe a bit more pronounced here, whether you're finding things like data cloud or the migration conversation or helping customers prioritize SAP within those conversations. On the data cloud side specifically, we hear a lot of software vendors out marketing their own solutions around things like data cloud. How do you get your customers to focus in on what you're doing and draw attention towards prioritization there as well? Thank you.
I can start. I mean, I had over 20 customer conversations now in the last two days, and I just said it to Thomas in the break.
What I absolutely love when you're walking here in these customer rooms, you find IT people, but you find head of supply chains, you find CFOs, you find HR people here, and they saw the iceberg of Muhammad and they said, "Oh, it's so clear. I mean, do I want to hit this iceberg?" I mean, I'm smiling, yeah, because it was really a battle, I have to admit, yeah, and four or five years ago to make our platform and the portfolio way more cohesive. The customers feel it. When we now can say, even say, "We give you a modular suite as a service and we manage even the integration for you," I mean, this is music to the ears for any CIO.
I have to say, I mean, I had talks down there, Wise, but then, okay, where do we start and how can we replace, you know, some best of breed sitting in the manufacturing sphere or in the planning space? Then comes Stefan DeBusser, formerly O9, and talks about, you know, how well everything is connected to procurement and to finance. I mean, that is, in the meantime, it's not only a nice story, it works beautifully. On the BDC side, I guess why you're also seeing such good feedback is, and I said it in the morning to a customer, yeah, when you look at, take Salesforce, yeah, and again, we had, it was not a pleasure to use this solution, but we had it.
Then we had a contact and then we had an opportunity and you create an opportunity, but it's a loose number. It doesn't mean anything commercially. The quote, it becomes a little bit tighter, yeah, but then you send out the order and here we are. The order is a binding object because the revenue realization, the contract, everything is related to this customer master. You can't come around when you're building your data module, even when it comes to the customer where you maybe have another company in mind, you cannot circumvent SAP. When we talk about the material, the supplier, the employee, the payroll, I mean, it's all SAP. Now we are saying, "Hey, we are making really a big step. You know what? We are sharing our data module." A big thing, heavily debated, but in a BDC environment.
That is, of course, now really leading to the fact that, "Hey, oh, now I really have a customer 360." Now really my agents can talk not only SAP CX, but also non-SAP CX data. That is, you know, I mean, this is sheer excitement because this, you know, we do not replicate data anymore. It is nice. The semantics of the data is the, this is the treasure at the end. That is what made SAP so strong for 50 years. Now we are expanding that to non-SAP. I mean, the BDC thing is really resonating well.
Thank you. Michael?
Yeah, thank you. Michael Briest at UBS. I think, Christian, it was in your slides you showed that 23% of customers now have four plus applications. I think last year it was 20%. The actual rate of growth has slowed.
I appreciate there's been a lot going on in the business in the last two, three years. Now with BDC and the suite as a service strategy, what should that number be and by when? Sorry, Dominik, just on your comments on the Q1 call about, you know, you would need a benign outcome to hit the high end of the cloud guidance this year. Yet your talk was very optimistic, I think, in tone around the acceleration. Can you maybe square that? Has there been a change in the environment that you see or whatever else is sort of underpinning this confidence?
I mean, Michael, when we launched Wise, it was, I mean, for us, for our sellers, it was like, you know, Christmas and Easter together. You know, they were totally focused on Wise, yeah, because it resonated well.
What we have found over the first two years is Wise is great, but now it's the time to really think through when the customers are on the journey about really the cross-selling. You know, to the cross-sell part, what we found out, the commercials, the incentives, the operating module in sales was not ideal, yeah, so that we by ourselves really harvest, you know, the benefit of the suite. We changed a lot of that. I can tell you only now in the last, you know, I would say four months, plus now what I'm seeing in the pipeline, plus what we are assuming, you can easily say that this 23% will now massively go up. You also have to see one thing. The customer can do so much at a time.
You know, when you are, I mean, we are touching not, you know, like pipeline management, we are touching supply chain, we are touching finance, we are touching RefReg, we are touching core HR. And these are the things, you know, where you have to give also the customer some time. I mean, I had customers there, like take Schneider Electric. They were live on SuccessFactors, super happy. Now we are doing, we did finance and now we are going into the factories. Would you have told the CEO, Jean-Pascal, four years back, "Can you not do all in a sudden?" He said, "Hey, I have a business to run." You know, customers also, it takes some time until they then move. That is why you are also seeing the WAM.
If you ask me incentive-Wise, commercial-Wise, operating model-Wise, the customers on the Wise journey now for a few years, I mean, the 23%, the plus we, you know, if you come back here next year and if I, and I cannot show you a number 30% plus, then we did not do a good job.
On the outlook for this year, I do not think I have said anything different than I used to say on the conference call. If anything has changed, it is the capital markets view on the risks. I mean, the markets have rebounded as if there is no risk around the tariff disputes. The underlying mechanics of the mix effect I have been harping on, they are very important and they are of course then exposed to tactical tweaks from this kind of environment.
We have to distinguish between the super strong secular trends in our business that create tailwind. I mentioned that kind of stupid extrapolation to the right giving us 3% accretion every year, which is wrong, but just to show how the mix effect is playing, I've used several ways to try to explain it. There are of course other factors that might modulate that secular trend. Of course, a trade war would modulate it down. I'm sorry if I was conveying something that's different from the conference call, but I really think that it's what we used to say for 2025. The upper end would still depend on some benign outcomes in that environment because I think otherWise there should be some quite massive impact on the world economy.
The good news is that, I mean, I trust the wisdom of crowds more than I trust my own judgment call. It seems to imply that everything will be good in the not too distant future.
Awesome. Lina, can we go to Adam, please? Thank you.
Thanks. Maybe just first of all, on the OpEx side, obviously one of the big transformations is going on in the sales and marketing department. I guess a lot of investors here will have seen Salesforce transformations, other software companies. I think we can all see why you want to do it and the cost benefits and efficiency benefits that can happen. While you execute on that, it can bring execution risks in the field.
Could you just talk a little bit about how you mitigate that, how much change is going on with the actual account execs versus people, you know, sitting in roles behind that and just how you manage through that? I guess, you know, kind of, you know, other HR question, maybe for Gina, on the next kind of 10,000 people that you look to hire, what kind of skills and seniority and location will you be looking to do that in? You know, how will that be different from what you've been doing in the past, which again, I guess also goes to the transformation of the company? Thank you.
Adam, do I say Adam? Yes. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. My eyes are blurry here. Getting a little bit older. Look, on the go-to-market. I mean, obviously I get why you're asking that question, yeah?
You have to strike the balance between we now need to finally transform versus you have to deliver numbers. I feel we are finding a good middle ground. I mean, if you have seen Jan today on stage, I hope you have seen a leader where customers can trust that he first of all understands industry, understands product, and really is interested in, you know, making the customers live and super successful. I have seen him in his other role. There always what he talked about was adoption, how about how do the customers expand? He has the right mindset. Of course, yeah, when you then look throughout the organization, do we need to have here and there some more surgical changes? Absolutely.
I mean, leaders in the go-to-market space who don't trust our partners, our resellers, they don't have a home anymore in SAP. We made this crystal clear. When we assign territories to the resellers, this must be territories where they can also win because only when they can win, they will invest into SAP. It's actually a quite easy formula. When you see now, you know, North America, we did changes. I'm super happy having now a new leader for Greater China for APJ. Simon really was world-class already in Microsoft Salesforce building a good channel there. I really feel at the top of the house, we have now the leadership in place to win, to even more win. Now when you see about the people, the sellers on the ground, I mean, continuous learning, it's not, you know, what we're saying here.
I can tell you, yeah, we definitely raise the bar, yeah, because we want to see, you know, the suite in action and everyone should be able to explain it, show it, demo it. The value engineer, same thing. When it comes to the adoption side, together with Thomas, obviously, we are now making sure that all of the tools you're seeing down there, which are so well integrated, are being used live with the customers. The second piece is maybe on the last thing, what we are now driving is, of course, I mean, we talk a lot about performance management. I mean, we are performance managed, but what we definitely also want to make sure that we are helping people on learning.
We, of course, also then, especially on the leadership side, we, of course, also raise the bar and say, "Hey, for example, take Muhammad's team." I mean, I'm absolutely excited when you see Muhammad talking about outside in. That's the mentality of what we have now on the product side, these kind of GMs, yeah, what you need to win in a certain line of business. That's what we are now actually translating in all parts of the organization. With the go-to-market side, we made some good necessary changes at the top. Sebastian is driving the transformation on the segmentation of the partners, the resellers. They are now way more on board. If you would ask me, we did it, yeah, with the right doses to really, on the one hand side, transform, on the other side, still delivering numbers.
Maybe just to add, I mean, we did not pull a rabbit out of a hat here. I mean, we really piloted a lot of these changes throughout 2024. We tested partner-driven territories in several market units. We tested the new segmentation approach. It is a program that we call Next Level Adoption and Consumption, the new account structures. We had, for example, all of Germany that had last year a fantastic year, completely live on this new operating model, new role profiles, new segmentation. It is not something we just like January 1, we said, "Here is a surprise, dear team." We really put a huge focus on enablement. We had all of our teams in every region. Us were personally there bringing all of them together to learn across all roles and go-to-market, learn, understand, teach them the new way, the new incentives.
I have a good feeling that this is, and of course, we constantly now monitor and adjust as we go.
Yeah, when it comes to the location strategy and also the hiring mix, it depends very much on which function we are looking at, right? It might look differently when Dominik and I are hiring because when it comes more to operations functions, also Sebastian, right? We are looking, okay, more into the best cost share where we also have our hubs already today. Argentina, for example, we have Philippines. This is where we have our Prague, where we have our shared service centers. When it comes to AI, for example, and AI, machine learning, cybersecurity, those are highly specific skills. When you see where we are hiring, this is Germany, for example. This is also Singapore, right?
We are also going to higher cost countries because there are specific skills you only find in high cost countries. It's very difficult to build them up in low cost. Nonetheless, there are very good countries, and this is what we're looking into at the moment, where we find upcoming skills in best cost countries, right? We also have now built a new hub in Vietnam, where we're building up engineering hubs. It is a mix actually, right?
We also have a very clear early talent hiring strategy, where we also just redefined the go-to-market because I think it's important to be attractive for the new generation and also hiring into our own academies because we are also building our own talent when it comes to sales, pre-sales, but also on the engineering side, we are now discussed that also on the AI side, we are thinking about building up a new academy. It really depends. When I look also into Thomas, enterprise architects, of course, this is a different seniority level, right? It really, really depends on what job profile you're looking at.
Awesome. Let's go to Toby.
Yeah, hi. Toby from JP Morgan. Dominik, I just wanted to come back just on the growth. I think you talked about growth rates there in the mid-teens.
Just wanted to confirm whether that was for SAP Group revenue growth. Does that then mean you're sort of expecting the growth to accelerate up towards that sort of mid-teens territory and then sort of sustain that level? Maybe just one for Christian, you know, how should we be thinking about the sequencing, you know, of these different growth drivers going forward? You know, when do you think Joule, Agentic AI monetization, and BDC can start to become a more meaningful contributor to revenue growth?
Okay. What I've been talking about is the cloud market in the segments we are catering to, which is currently forecast by IDC at around 70%.
I said when you haircut that for service dilution at a point in time where you have kind of 10% or so of service revenues, that's the type of growth rate you should have when you grow with the market. Why shouldn't we grow with the market? Of course, there's a long transition period here until we drive all the software revenues out and so forth. It is just to say that the kind of asymptotic destiny is not in the single digits. It's somewhere else. This is the way I would like to be understood on that. If you then also look at the extrapolation logic from the near term, you see that we are kind of working our way up and that we said in 2026, 2027, we want to add on what we have guided for 2025.
It's what I call that triangulation between where the kind of center of gravity of the market sits and where we're working from the bottom. That's a reasonable ballpark to think about, yeah.
On the BDC side, look, some first customers already signed deals, contracts, which is good. Looking at the pipeline, definitely, I mean, we see now in half year two, we will go on to sign more BDC deals, not 10, not 20. Let's talk about hundreds of deals. I definitely expect Q4, we will reach, you know, of course, already a pretty significant volume. For the years to come, I remain now super optimistic that we will not only convert install base with BW, but that we, of course, upselling also with the intelligent apps, with the data products.
The same, what is also then true for AI will also then be true for BDC, the data products, the AI tool. When I look into our win loss, you know, 50% of the deals included AI units. I mean, in 50% of the deals, AI was a main driver for winning over, you know, some best of breed. If you would ask me, will this go up? This will for sure go up. Now with more and more agents coming, not only having, you know, embedded, but then really having also across processes, you know, agents taking care about quarter ends, about pricing, et cetera. I mean, I actually expect that this will further go up. The standard charter is for me then a good piece once when we arrived, landed. I mean, they are now adopting more and more and more.
Over time, you're going to see also the existing customers, you know, hopefully consuming more AI units. This is the pattern we already see. For me, I mean, the most important report about AI is adoption. Yeah, we are super, super laser focused on what do the customers use, which AI use cases are still a little bit tricky to talk to Muhammad, to talk to Thomas about what is about the activation, what about the AI use case, the value. So far, we see we are very happy also with the way how we see how the customers consume the AI.
Awesome. Maybe let's go to this side as well.
Great, thank you. Sven Merk from Barclays. You talked about that the cloud conversion and cross-selling could drive up to five times uplift compared to your on your support revenues.
Could you comment how far you are on that journey with your cloud customers? Is there still a 2X uplift possible? Thank you.
The 2X is already here and there. I mean, we see it in the Wise deals. I mean, we did not have one quarter where the conversion factor was below two. Sometimes it is up to three. Now, when you then, you know, continue now, and as I said earlier, yeah, some customers are now at the point where they see, "Oh, the suite is real. Let's really, and after we did finance, let's go into supply chain. Let's go into HR." You know, we definitely see now that, you know, there is for sure, you know, a higher conversion now coming on top of the initial conversion with private cloud just by cross-selling.
When you look at Schneider Electric, I mean, they started their Wise journey with private because North America is a huge complex business. Now they are going, you know, for certain pieces from private to public and say, "Hey, I'm happy to actually pay more because what I'm getting is pure standardization, pure automation, AI out of the box, BDC comes out of the box." You know, when you would ask me, we are today at 2-3X upside. I definitely see that in the years to come, more and more customers. I talked about 30% next year will move also into more, you know, using cross-selling, using our solutions across the suite. With that, we are also going to see more higher conversion rates going forward.
Maybe just at the risk of stating the obvious, I just want to make sure that we have the definition exactly right, what that means. I mean, we talk about the ACV in the cloud versus the support we have on-prem. That 2-3X is the initial RISE deal signed. It's not what you have in cloud revenues one second afterwards. I mean, first there is the deployment of the solution, a couple of months, and then you ramp it. It's the ACV we talk about. Maybe a little bit later, they sign another module of SAP. That's how this kind of journey continues. Does it make sense?
Yeah, basically just wanted to get a sense if from a journey perspective, if there's still, you know, we went in the initial phase, you did the 2-3X.
Where are we at the moment when you look at across the installed base in cloud? Are you at 2.5 or are you at 3? Are you already well ahead of it?
Yeah, I would say it's fair to say that we are between, you know, between two and three. And you saw 23% of the customers already use more than four. They are probably at 3X, others a little bit lower. Are we confident, you know, to what we have seen that we can make this a more like a 5X? Absolutely.
Perfect. Thank you.
Okay, maybe let's go to Fred here.
Thank you very much, Fred. Thank you, Mirka. Very helpful flow chart around what drove growth in the cloud business in the last couple of years. Looking forward, should we expect a similar split in terms of building blocks of cloud between migration?
I guess in the past was more around 20-30% you mentioned today. Cross-sell and upsell, including in AI and net new contribution. If you can frame a little bit how you see that, the different drivers in the next couple of years would be great.
I mean, there is of course a lot of pressure now to do more of the cloud conversions in the coming years because we have the out-of-maintenance windows looming. That will certainly fuel that. Of course, the number is also getting bigger. The comparables are getting bigger. On the other hand, you heard the opportunities around BDC, which is of course a new opportunity. It's nothing to do with conversion in some way.
These will be meaningful opportunities when we were discussing that kind of extrapolation from where we currently trend towards the kind of market discounted for some service dilution. You see that the percentage point is a lot. I mean, it's a long step in that journey towards that target. If you think was a percentage point in year four or five of a reasonable forecast period, you see that, well, if it's a billion business, it's highly accretive. It would add a couple, a little bit less than a couple of percentage points of growth. Just to give you some feeling about the dimensions we talk about now, whether this happens in year four or year five, we can't tell you today because these are both the AI and the BDC are emerging products.
Clearly, these need to be billion plus markets at some point in time. When exactly that happens, we cannot tell and do not want to speculate on today, but it is clearly something that is highly accretive to make that journey to higher growth rates on the consolidated basis more plausible.
Yeah, as I said before, everything on the go-to-market side is now focused on cloud ERP. The demos, the prototypes, everything we are building, the incentives, the migration credits, by the way, just to also make that clear. I mean, a customer has one IT budget. We are believing do not spend 10X on services, rather spend your money on innovation. We want to take here and there some burden away to say you should not spend your money on commodity services. To Thomas' point, there are tools out there.
When you do it in the right way, it doesn't need to be 10X. You also need less people on the services side. We are helping you to really then making sure they are adopting more of the suite. I can share with you next year that we have more of, you know, 30% and more customers using more than, you know, four solutions of SAP as part of the suite. I guess this is, you know, how we are also focusing our sales team, our go-to-market team on the assets where it really matters for the long-term growth of SAP.
Great. Let's go to Charlie.
Hi, thank you. It's Charlie Brennan from Jefferies. Just two questions for me. Firstly, the feedback from the floor to me is the AI is great, but the biggest body of work is still shifting ECC customers to S/4.
Can you talk about what you're doing to encourage that move and maybe give us more color on the migration credits? A few of the partners are making the observation to me that by 2033, S/4HANA is going to be 18 years old. Is there a scenario, and we heard Schneider Electric going with GROW, is there a scenario where GROW gets functionally richer and you steadily move to public cloud as the true north star and you move from a two-tier architecture to one-tier architecture? Just a few, Dominik, I don't want to leave you out, just a clarification on the cash flow. You gave us a very helpful formula to understand cash flow. I think it was EBIT times tax.
That's 100. Yeah, exactly. That's EUR 1 billion.
Are you flagging that 2026 and 2027 are going to be below that formula due to the phasing of tax and migration credits?
Okay, I can start and Thomas, maybe you can also build on it from an accelerator move. I mean, very important is Wise and GROW have both one destiny. That's the business suite and the public cloud. Now you have seen Schneider is a very good example. In some places of the world, they can already standardize. In other places of the world, like North America, it takes some more time. The destiny still is to one completely end-to-end business suite in the public cloud. That is true for all of our Wise customers. Now you have to see that there are two things which need to happen for that. Obviously, you have to have the mindset. I mean, look at our transformation.
If there would be no leadership from the top to tell the teams on how we're going to go to market, about how we price, about how we run as a company in the fulfillment functions, forget about it. You will always stay in, you know, in a highly customized ERP environment because there is no clarity from the top about how you want to run as a company. Here we are helping our customers really actively to say, "Look, here are our tools. Here's our methodology. Here's how we would do the change management." Obviously, we are working with the ASIs and, you know, enabling them to enable this move.
Second, on the migration credits, if then customers come to us with the business case and they say, "Well, we like the AI, we like the value, we like the ROI, but short term, yeah, of course the services costs are pretty high." This is, you know, where we apply here and there some credits to make the business case even more sound also on the short term. This is how we are driving that. From a tooling perspective, Thomas, on how, and our last piece, S4, I mean, in the cloud, S4 never gets old because we are actually now, I mean, the customers, they are doing the last ERP upgrade, the last ERP upgrade. From that on, when we did the fit to standard, we are updating it.
Every time you are getting new features, you can buy more AI, you can consume more data products, you can consume, you can actually, you know, expand, you know, in the suite, but your product will never be old. When I had a large customer down there today, I mean, the number one reason is, Christian, what we love the most, we do not do an ERP upgrade ever again. We are always on the latest finance, supply chain, HR solution. From there, we innovate together so we can come down with our IT spend on services and spend the money where it matters for us on the innovation side.
I think the move from ECC to S4, we always need to look to the specifics of the customer because fundamentally there are two big different approaches.
The one called Brownfield, which is basically a conversion of the ECC to S/4. That's actually a quick thing that's super easy. For sure, we also now use actually AI to automate and help with the acceleration of the moves. If you talk about a Greenfield approach, which means a new basically rollout from the scratch, thinking about business process optimization and standardization, that's for sure a different approach. I'll give you a concrete example because I think concrete examples always help visualize that. Take BMW. BMW is using actually four different Greenfield templates for finance, for the supply chain, and for the factories. Basically, they will, on a Brownfield conversion, convert all of their factories at scale and altogether with RISE with SAP.
That is something where we for sure, to Christian's point, have the tooling to make that happen, which means the pure conversion is not a problem at all in the meantime. For sure, if companies then want to standardize, it is more actually a change management effort on the business side to do that standardization. You mentioned actually the topic about two-tier and one-tier. To be precise, for Schneider Electric, this is a tier one. They will run entire Europe, entire Germany, all of their revenues, all factories, all manufacturing on S/4HANA and public cloud. S/4HANA and public cloud is ready for prime time. Just to make it super clear, it is a strong product which can run a complex company like Schneider Electric without a doubt. We have proven it. We are live in many of the factories already.
Just to be very clear, S/4 and public cloud is ready for prime time in that sense. What you mentioned with the 18 years, I think what you need to recognize also from an architectural point of view with RISE with SAP, it's not just, if you think about it, the cloud ERP private portion, but we have this modular architecture of our cloud suite, which also means as part of RISE with SAP and basically the offerings which we do, it also includes new cloud capabilities which we put together, but seamlessly integrates based on the work the team is doing and standardizing on the data, which means it's consistently with new innovations, continuous innovation which we drive as part of this cloud offering.
It's not just one product which stays, but it already today, if you think about RISE today versus when we launched in 2021, it looks different and the customer feels that. I think that's perhaps also something that you feel here on the floor, would be interested in your feedback, but I think you see it. The customers see that we walk the talk from the last five years, how we evolve the product portfolio, how the pieces fit together, and the conversation shifted into how we make it real, how we can help to accelerate to get to this beautiful world which they see. That's exactly what we want to do with this tooling in that sense. That's the reason why, to Christian's point, we continuously innovate in the cloud in that sense and take it higher.
To the cash flow, the formula I gave is like a trendline formula. We take the non-IFRS operating profit, you deduct the taxes, and we've given some indication it's between 28-32%. You add the delta between stock-based compensation, P&L, and cash, which is positive at a tune of very roughly around about EUR 1 billion. That's the kind of trendline. Of course, there's some noise, and I made some hints that there is a little bit of a kind of adverse noise coming because what are the elements? I'd say there is the currency. We have basically hedged most of the cash flow for this year at a quite favorable rate. We were lucky that we did it early in the year. We have more difficult comps, of course, if the exchange rate stayed where we are today.
We have phasing issues on the transformation credit. I want to highlight, though, that it's not that there is some kind of black hole on transformation credit versus P&L in conversion. Over the cycle of the deal, the conversion will be one because P&L and cash flow have to tie, but it's front-end loaded if the customers use these credits upfront, which we actually want to do so we're not piling up a bunch of liabilities, so to speak. That's a phasing, a pure phasing topic, and you can speculate about the kind of present value impact of how it's phased. Yes, it's true that in 2026, it's probably not an easy year from that perspective, but when there's noise to the downside, we, of course, create as much noise to the upside we can to compensate.
Last but not least, there's the tax rate, which is very much, yeah, we had the special effect of the restructuring. There's a big gap between the non-IFRS operating profit and the IFRS operating profit. Actually, the restructuring is largely tax deductible, and we create a tax shield, so to speak. Not all of the theoretical tax shield is usable because we also lost some withholding taxes. I think we explained it in prior conference calls. That positive, it was a positive impact or will be a positive impact, is currently a positive impact in 2025, but it's not going to be an adverse impact in 2026. Relatively, in the year-to-year comparison, it's a negative impact because it has been positive in 2025. I hope that gives you a little bit of a feeling how that noise around the trendline is affecting 2026.
Okay, let's go to Johannes.
Yeah, thanks, Johannes from Deutsche Bank. I was wondering if we could zoom in a little bit on the SME market opportunity. I mean, Christian, in one of your slides, I think you said 60% of your TAM is in SME. If I just very simplistically multiply that by the EUR 450 billion you laid out in another slide, that's a huge market opportunity. Probably one way you can gain a lot of share. How do you really think about that? I mean, with the change that Sebastian has driven now on go-to-market, can you really address all of that market?
You obviously have been winning some share already, or are there areas where you say, "Look, the economics don't work for us," or "We can't be there for other specific reasons in that particular geography or niche?" As a second question, maybe for Gina, you've obviously introduced your new people agenda now. If you kind of fast forward a few years, what are the kind of key KPIs you're thinking about to assess if that has been a success? If you could shed a bit of light on that, thank you.
Yeah, Johannes, on the SME side, Mark from a go-to-market side, and maybe Muhammad can add a few points from a product perspective because we can really scale down at a high gross margin in a much better way than it was five years back, having now a suite which can scale.
Now, from a go-to-market perspective, see, we have now, we have resellers, we have territories, we are giving them around EUR 400 million of bookings this year, which is for them territories with customers. That is just the starting point, yeah, because that is the market. It is a very big market. We can go easily down to 10-15 users and have an 80% gross margin. For us, this is now, of course, a market where we really want to double down, but definitely not with our own salespeople. We need the ecosystem here to scale. Now they get the same learnings, they get the same demos, they get everything. It was not exactly always there in the past. We do a lot on the enablement side.
For me, when you look at Databricks or when you look at some of the Chinese unicorns who won SAP, or when you look at the BYD when they were way smaller than today, I mean, what they are getting is they are starting with an SME suite where they do not have to do another migration because, oh, suddenly the best of breed can only do five countries or six countries. No, they have a platform which enables them to scale up to over 100 countries. The last piece, when you wonder, okay, there is now a public cloud Schneider and there is a mid-market customer. This is where we have the industry cloud verticals to make sure the product stays super easy to use also for an SME, while on the platform, we extend the capabilities industry-Wise, of course, also for some bigger customers.
I guess with that, we are really very well now able to set up to also win in the SME space.
Yeah, I mean, I think the only two things I would add is from a product perspective, we're not, from a product perspective, we can scale the segments, if you will. We've got the depth of the capability for the enterprise, the simplicity, and the experience for the SME. And certainly, we've got some good traction on the concurrent business as well in the SME space as well. Customer experience applications, for instance, the TCO is so, I don't know if I could use this technical word, but ridiculously low that it allows us to do some amazing things from a scale and embedding perspective too.
The final thing I would ask is we also announced this advanced partnership with Accenture yesterday in the keynote as well that is now bringing our partners along with some pre-configured templates as well that goes down a bit down market, but still leverages their expertise and their go-to-market as well to go tap into that TAM as well.
Yeah, and maybe just to give you a sense of, on Monday, always before Sapphire, we do Partner Day. We had two and a half thousand partners there. Usually, the biggest room, the fullest room is the SI room. This year, the fullest room was the reseller room because they really sensed the opportunity. It was packed to the max. They were super excited about it. Now I think we need to change the brand perception. We need to create the demand, enable the partners.
There are companies like ISA Aerospace. I didn't even know they are live on SAP public cloud because many of these go through indirect, and it's a fantastic opportunity we are super excited about.
When it comes to KPIs, at the moment, I'm also building a complete HR dashboard for every category of the people agenda as we are to roll out and build certain elements. I can't give you exact numbers, but the areas where I'm looking at, first of all, very important that you're measuring the cultural transformation impact. I've been doing now cultural transformation since 15 years, and there are clear measurements. We do a baseline measurement now. We do a cultural diagnostics, and then you do the intervention.
After one year, two years, three years, you can really see if you are managing the cultural shift, and there are certain elements in there. We're measuring also, are we shifting into a collaborative growth culture, how we call it? There are certain behaviors underneath. It also means that you have less resistance in the organization, that we are faster in decision-making, and you can measure that. The other element, and this is also related to tear-down organizational silos, is that we are trying to rotate our talents. One measurement is definitely to say, okay, how much talent mobility do we have? Can we increase that with everything what we're implementing? Another big focus area is how we build our leaders, extremely important. You will see also KPIs around how healthy is our succession pipeline with the right skills again.
You will always see the skill lens in there because this is extremely important that we are also able to measure our hiring data. Are we able to attract fast enough also the talents? Are we able to keep the talent in the organization? Those are pieces we will measure going forward.
Awesome. Unfortunately, we are already up on time. Sorry for that. Thank you so much for joining us online. Thank you to the SAP Executive Board for answering the question. Thanks for Thomas for joining us. We are looking forward to seeing you again at our Q2 earnings print on July 22nd. Thank you so much.
Thanks a lot.
Thank you.