SAP Passes Cloud Barrier, Targets Salesforce

As the old guard of enterprise software such as Microsoft and Oracle reinvented themselves for the cloud market in recent years, SAP took its time. Companies used its software for handling sensitive areas like supply chain management and finance, which made them reluctant to put it into the public cloud. But the German firm, the third largest enterprise software firm with a market capitalization of $137 billion, may finally be making some progress.

In an interview with The Information, CEO Bill McDermott says SAP will this year make more of its revenue from cloud-based software than the traditional kind of licensed software used by companies in their own data centers. And now he is setting his sights on overtaking Salesforce in the $40 billion global market for software that salespeople use to manage their customers.