As the red-hot market for cloud ERP applications accelerates into 2019, businesses looking to move finance, logistics and other key operations into the cloud are enjoying a strong buyer’s market as cloud heavyweights Oracle, SAP and Workday continue to compete savagely in this mission-critical segment.
Here’s a sampling of how those three cloud vendors are positioning themselves in the huge market for cloud applications to manage not only financials but also supply chain, procurement, planning, budgeting and more.
- Oracle: “Oracle’s two cloud ERP businesses, Fusion ERP and NetSuite ERP, delivered a combined revenue growth rate of 32% in Q2,” Oracle CEO Mark Hurd said in a press release issued yesterday to announce the company’s fiscal Q2 earnings. “With nearly 6,000 Fusion ERP customers and over 16,000 NetSuite ERP customers, Oracle is the clear leader in cloud ERP.”
- Workday: On its fiscal Q3 earnings call late last month, Workday CEO Aneel Bhusri said, “We saw accelerated growth for our Financial Management suite of applications as subscription revenue once again grew more than 50%, with net new [annual contract value] for core financials growing at more than 60%.” Bhusri cited three drivers behind Workday’s cloud ERP growth: “our expanded set of offerings, the increasing acceptance of the cloud by the office of the CFO,” and a rapidly growing network of successful and happy Financial Management customers.
- SAP: Two months ago, in his opening remarks on SAP’s Q3 earnings call, CEO Bill McDermott said, “With 41% cloud revenue growth in Q3, SAP has the fastest cloud growth of any peer at scale in the enterprise applications software industry. We said that C/4 HANA [its new CRM suite] and S/4 HANA [its cloud ERP suite] would be major cloud growth drivers, and both grew triple digits in Q3.”
While none of those Big 3 cloud ERP providers offered specific revenue numbers for their financially focused SaaS suites, the growth rates are eye-popping: 32% for Oracle, which probably has the largest cloud ERP business among the three and therefore the biggest base to expand upon; “triple digits” for SAP’s S/4HANA; and more than 50% for Workday Financials.
At the same time, one of the rapidly emerging dynamics in the Cloud Wars is the very healthy and much-needed deconstruction of the silos fragmenting the traditional enterprise-apps categories of ERP, CRM and HCM.
As more and more companies move along their journeys to become digital businesses, and as those newly shaped businesses need to be able to see the right types of data in the right combinations in the right contexts at the right time, the cloud versions of ERP and CRM and HCM are becoming much more interconnected and easy to integrate.
In the broadest and most-sweeping initiative to redefine enterprise apps for the cloud, SAP is looking to do nothing short of unifying the supply chain with the demand chain via its recent dramatic acquisition of experience-management unicorn Qualtrics.
Workday, via its acquisition several months ago of Adaptive Insights, has added powerful planning tools to its suite of financial apps to allow it to become a full-fledged ERP provider whose applications and data models are expressly crafted to work seamlessly with its market leading Workday HR apps.
And Oracle, which contends that ERP is the largest enterprise-application segment, believes that by becoming #1 in cloud ERP, the laws of physics and the power of gravity will pull more business into its CX/CRM and HCM businesses.
But whatever happens inside the industry in these critical SaaS battles in the Cloud Wars, the biggest winners by far will be the business customers who stand to gain huge business value from the brutal competition being waged by SAP, Workday and Oracle to become the cloud ERP leader of the future.
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RECOMMENDED READING FROM CLOUD WARS:
The World’s Top 5 Cloud-Computing Suppliers: #1 Microsoft, #2 Amazon, #3 Salesforce, #4 SAP, #5 IBM
Amazon Versus Oracle: The Battle for Cloud Database Leadership
As Amazon Battles with Retailers, Microsoft Leads Them into the Cloud
Why Microsoft Is #1 in the Cloud: 10 Key Insights
SAP’s Stunning Transformation: Qualtrics Already “Crown Jewel of Company”
Watch Out, Microsoft and Amazon: Google Cloud CEO Thomas Kurian Plans To Be #1
The Coming Hybrid Wave: Where Do Microsoft, IBM and Amazon Stand? (Part 1 of 2)
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