{"id":32157,"date":"2017-10-20T13:39:31","date_gmt":"2017-10-20T13:39:31","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.cloudcomputing-news.net\/news\/2017\/oct\/20\/ibm-and-saps-financial-results-analysed-strong-cloud-focus-contrasting-outlooks\/"},"modified":"2017-10-20T13:39:31","modified_gmt":"2017-10-20T13:39:31","slug":"ibm-and-saps-financial-results-analysed-strong-cloud-focus-but-contrasting-outlooks","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/icloud.pe\/blog\/ibm-and-saps-financial-results-analysed-strong-cloud-focus-but-contrasting-outlooks\/","title":{"rendered":"IBM and SAP\u2019s financial results analysed: Strong cloud focus but contrasting outlooks"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><img decoding=\"async\" src=\"http:\/\/www.cloudcomputing-news.net\/media\/img\/news\/-picture-id655190482.jpg\"><\/p>\n<p>IBM and SAP have both declared their most recent financials with cloud growth continuing on both sides, but still questions to be answered overall.<\/p>\n<p>For IBM, overall revenues were again on the slide &ndash; $19.15 million (&pound;14.5m) for the most recent quarter compared with $19.23m for this time last year &ndash; but cloud revenue was up 20% and overall results beat analyst expectations, seeing IBM&rsquo;s shares surge as a result. <a href=\"http:\/\/www.marketwatch.com\/story\/ibms-stock-surge-is-one-for-the-history-books-2017-10-18\">According to MarketWatch<\/a>, the stock&rsquo;s one-day post-earnings percentage gain was the biggest since IBM reported fourth quarter 2008 results.<\/p>\n<p>IBM cited the strength of embedded cloud and cognitive capabilities across their business as a key factor in the financials&rsquo; success, as Martin Schroeter, senior vice president and CFO, explained to analysts. &ldquo;Our strategic imperatives, as we&rsquo;ve said, are a signpost of the progress we&rsquo;re making in helping our enterprise clients to extract value from data, and become digital businesses,&rdquo; said Schroeter, &ldquo;and so our strategic imperatives aren&rsquo;t separate businesses, but a view of the revenue across our segments that provide our clients with analytics, cloud, security, mobile and social capabilities.&rdquo;<\/p>\n<p>Schroeter added that &lsquo;as a service&rsquo; revenue was up 24% in the third quarter, and cloud revenue going up 20% translated to a $15.8bn revenue base over the past 12 months, representing 20% of IBM&rsquo;s revenue.<\/p>\n<p>With SAP, cloud subscriptions and support were at &euro;937 million (&pound;839.4m), up 22% from this time last year, with overall cloud and software and total revenues up 5% and 4% from Q316 respectively.<\/p>\n<p>New cloud bookings were at &euro;302m, an increase of 19% from this time last year, with the figure prompting questions from analysts over the state of the growth.<\/p>\n<p>CEO Bill McDermott described the quarter overall as strong, noted S\/4 HANA grew new cloud bookings &lsquo;triple digit&rsquo; in Q3, and said Q4 will be stronger. &ldquo;As you may recall from Q3 2016, we experienced some seasonality in our cloud business on a smaller base,&rdquo; he said, <a href=\"https:\/\/seekingalpha.com\/article\/4114787-saps-sap-ceo-william-mcdermott-q3-2017-results-earnings-call-transcript?part=single\">as transcribed by Seeking Alpha<\/a>. &ldquo;When you think about SAP&rsquo;s cloud growth, we increasingly see customers pursuing more large-scale transformations, which have a tendency to close in Q4.<\/p>\n<p>&ldquo;You can expect a dynamite Q4, and very consistent with our year to date growth rate in revenues,&rdquo; McDermott added.<\/p>\n<p>Responding to a specific question around confidence on cloud bookings rebounding in Q4, SAP CFO Luka Mucic said the company was &lsquo;waiting for the big brands&rsquo; to come through, citing Shell as already on board and adding two &lsquo;global brand[s] of massive significance&rsquo; will be announcing in the near future.<\/p>\n<p>&ldquo;I have total unequivocal unwavering confidence in the cloud bookings for Q4. It&rsquo;s going to be a really strong Q4 bookings number. I&rsquo;ll count on it. On Q1, especially, inspired by S\/4 HANA in the public cloud. We&rsquo;re winning deals everywhere. We have the perfect alignment between the innovation and the field execution now.&rdquo;<\/p>\n<p>You can read the IBM earnings statement <a href=\"https:\/\/www.ibm.com\/investor\/att\/pdf\/IBM-3Q17-Earnings-Prepared-Remarks.pdf\">here (pdf)<\/a>, and the SAP statement <a href=\"https:\/\/www.sap.com\/docs\/download\/investors\/2017\/sap-2017-q2-statement.pdf\">here (pdf).<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>IBM and SAP have both declared their most recent financials with cloud growth continuing on both sides, but still questions to be answered overall.<br \/>\nFor IBM, overall revenues were again on the slide &ndash; $19.15 million (&pound;14.5m) for the most rec&#8230;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":50,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-32157","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/icloud.pe\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/32157","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/icloud.pe\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/icloud.pe\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/icloud.pe\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/50"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/icloud.pe\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=32157"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/icloud.pe\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/32157\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":32158,"href":"https:\/\/icloud.pe\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/32157\/revisions\/32158"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/icloud.pe\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=32157"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/icloud.pe\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=32157"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/icloud.pe\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=32157"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}