SAP CEO: We Are the Fastest Growing Business Software Company in the World

“We grew 41 percent in the cloud and SAP has now become the fastest growing enterprise application software company in the world,” said SAP CEO Bill McDermott in an interview on CNBC. “For business software, we are the fastest growing company in the world. It’s amazing how fast the growth is in the cloud.”

Bill McDermott, SAP CEO:

Our cloud business is growing faster than anyone else’s, but we are also partnering. If you look at Microsoft and the Azure Cloud, of which Microsoft has been a great partner of ours for four decades now. If you look at AWS with Amazon or if you look at the Google Cloud platform or if you look at Alibaba in China, we have partnerships with all of these hyperscalers.

It’s All About an Open Initiative For Customers

Our reference architecture, our software, can also run in there cloud which gives us another set of distribution channels around the world to expand our market-leading software. They’re all going to grow fast and we’re going to grow fast.

It’s all about an open initiative for customers. Customers really need to manage their business in real time and the cloud is a great way to do it. It’s lower cost, faster innovation, easier to consume, it’s a winning formula.

Bill McDermott On the Economy

It’s really amazing. I’ve been obviously all over the world and if you go to China right now, things for us and all solution oriented tech companies are very strong. The Asian region is outstanding.

John Kerry and I hosted a meeting in Bankok and we met with 35 CEOs that simply could not possibly be more positive about the economic scenario.

Shortly thereafter, I was in Israel with Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Chancellor Angela Merkel talking about Industry 4.0, venture capital, and tech investment. Yesterday, in Canada with Prime Minister Trudeau where there is a huge AI opportunity with great young people highly skilled in AI. Everyplace you go there’s nothing but optimism.

Trade Tensions Have No Impact on the Tech Industry

The trade tensions are something that is obviously concerning, business people don’t like uncertainty, but in terms of the real impact of the business volume, new orders, global pipeline, I don’t see any impact at this stage for the tech industry.