It’s been tough sledding of late for the world’s largest application software vendor. After years of domination in the enterprise, SAP now finds itself at a corporate crossroads.
As eCRM Guide reports, this week’s earnings report will give investors, customers and longtime SAP rivals better sense of just where the company is going and how it’s planning to attack the SaaS and cloud-computing markets that are reshaping the enterprise software market.
A management shakeup combined with several big-dollar acquisitions speaks to just how uncomfortable this once unshakeable software juggernaut has become as its watched its sales and profit growth regress while competitors such as Oracle (NASDAQ: ORCL) and IBM (NYSE: IBM) continue to gain share and improve their stock prices.
Investors will be particularly keen to hear about SAP’s on-demand applications as well as any new customer wins that would indicate the company has woken up to the fact that SAP is no longer the only obvious choice for software regardless of the industry.
SAP (NYSE: SAP) has a commanding lead in the business intelligence market, but the German software giant has had its struggles of late. Investors will get their latest look at how the company is doing when it reports its quarterly results tomorrow morning.
SAP enjoys a wide lead over rivals Oracle (NASDAQ: ORCL), SAS and IBM (NYSE: IBM) in the market for business intelligence, analytics and performance management, according to Gartner.
But the competition has gotten tougher. Its aggressive and acquisitive rival Oracle routinely trumpets market share gains over SAP in its earnings announcements, while business analytics was one of IBM’s strongest sources of growth in its recent earnings report.
SAP, meanwhile, has endured earnings disappointments and a management shakeup earlier this year.
