Enterprise

SAP unveiled a big sales promo. It's a bid to juice cloud customer numbers.

The move is the culmination of CEO Christian Klein's efforts to turn around the German software giant.

SAP data center

SAP unveiled "RISE with SAP" on Wednesday.

Image: SAP

SAP CEO Christian Klein is trying out a major sales gambit in his attempt to get more customers onboard the software giant's signature cloud platform.

A new offer unveiled on Wednesday called "RISE with SAP" bundles together several products, including the flagship S/4 HANA platform, under one contract with a flat cost, a promotion that the company is hoping will encourage more users to more quickly switch from the on-premise services that dominated the company's product line until the last few years.

The offering, and the promotional blitz behind it, are a culmination of sorts of Klein's work over the past several months to remake SAP. While it signals progress in his vision to become a core tech provider — one that links data from all a company's operations on a single — it's also a big gambit, particularly if Klein can't address key concerns from customers, many of whom might be looking to shrink their IT spend on SAP's products.

To incentivize the pivot, SAP is promising a "highly automated" migration with "near-zero downtimes," effectively a move to try to standardize an often arduous and costly transformation that may have prevented new and existing customers from pursuing such an upgrade. And in a nod to the open partner ecosystem Klein is pushing, those who take advantage can use SAP's cloud, one of several of the major providers (Microsoft Azure, AWS, Google Cloud or Alibaba Cloud) or a private network.

Embedded in the packaged system are also numerous "business process intelligence" tools, such as robotic process automation, that help organizations, among other applications, pinpoint tasks that can be done solely by machines. SAP purchased Signavio, a provider of software that helps businesses manage workflows, to help further amplify these offerings, per a Wednesday announcement.

"We are bundling everything companies need to holistically transform their business, with a fast time to value regardless of their starting point," Klein told reporters.

Since COVID-19 hit, investments in the type of technology that SAP offers, the bulk of which center around the core enterprise resource planning system, fell in priority for many enterprises. Existing customers are also putting off upgrading, instead choosing to elongate use of their current platforms, many of which run via on-site data centers. The convergence of both led Klein to issue a stark warning in October that SAP's recovery would last until 2025 at the earliest. The stock price has yet to fully recover after dropping roughly 23% following that proclamation.

Wednesday's announcement shows that he's hoping to accelerate that timeline by quickly juicing the company's number of overall cloud customers. Under such a system, expensive, long-term contracts are traded for monthly subscription payments. While that might mean lower upfront costs for some clients, industry experts say they may end up paying more over the long term, especially if customers add on other services, which is one reason why the strategy is so attractive for vendors. SAP, for example, previously estimated that cloud revenue could exceed traditional sales and reach roughly $26 billion by 2025.

When asked, on average, how much more clients would end up paying under this promotion, Klein said the offering "has a lot of value in it." A spokesperson declined to say how SAP was factoring this offer into its overall financial outlook.

And for clients that held off on the cloud until now, the offer provides a seemingly viable rationale to move, with one consolidated contract likely covering the bulk of their needs, including service and deployment costs.

"It will take a great deal of work to move these large customized enterprises off of their legacy applications," IDC Program Vice President Mickey North Rizza told Protocol. "SAP customers have been given a pathway towards the intelligent enterprise using modern software."

The offering ran as a pilot project since July, with 130 customers currently signed up. As of Wednesday, it's now available for new and existing customers.

"The machine internally is already ready," said Klein.

Joe Williams

Joe Williams is a writer-at-large at Protocol. He previously covered enterprise software for Protocol, Bloomberg and Business Insider. Joe can be reached at JoeWilliams@Protocol.com. To share information confidentially, he can also be contacted on a non-work device via Signal (+1-309-265-6120) or JPW53189@protonmail.com.

sap cloud microsoft alibaba aws azure google google cloud
metaverse
Entertainment

Niantic’s future hinges on mapping the metaverse

The maker of Pokémon Go is hoping the metaverse will deliver its next big break.

Niantic's new standalone messaging and social app, Campfire, is a way to get players organizing and meeting up in the real world. It launches today for select Pokémon Go players.

Image: Niantic

Pokémon Go sent Niantic to the moon. But now the San Francisco-based augmented reality developer has returned to earth, and it’s been trying to chart its way back to the stars ever since. The company yesterday announced layoffs of about 8% of its workforce (about 85 to 90 people) and canceled four projects, Bloomberg reported, signaling another disappointment for the studio that still generates about $1 billion in revenue per year from Pokémon Go.

Finding its next big hit has been Niantic’s priority for years, and the company has been coming up short. For much of the past year or so, Niantic has turned its attention to the metaverse, with hopes that its location-based mobile games, AR tech and company philosophy around fostering physical connection and outdoor exploration can help it build what it now calls the “real world metaverse.”

Keep Reading Show less
Nick Statt

Nick Statt is Protocol's video game reporter. Prior to joining Protocol, he was news editor at The Verge covering the gaming industry, mobile apps and antitrust out of San Francisco, in addition to managing coverage of Silicon Valley tech giants and startups. He now resides in Rochester, New York, home of the garbage plate and, completely coincidentally, the World Video Game Hall of Fame. He can be reached at nstatt@protocol.com.

augmented reality pokemon go video games virtual reality metaverse
sponsored content
Sponsored Content

You’re either real-time or out of time

Every day, millions of us press the “order” button on our favorite coffee store's mobile application: Our chosen brew will be on the counter when we arrive. It’s a personalized, seamless experience that we have all come to expect. What we don’t know is what’s happening behind the scenes. The mobile application is sourcing data from a database that stores information about each customer and what their favorite coffee drinks are. It is also leveraging event-streaming data in real time to ensure the ingredients for your personal coffee are in supply at your local store.

Applications like this power our daily lives, and if they can’t access massive amounts of data stored in a database as well as stream data “in motion” instantaneously, you — and millions of customers — won’t have these in-the-moment experiences.

Keep Reading Show less
Jennifer Goforth Gregory
Jennifer Goforth Gregory has worked in the B2B technology industry for over 20 years. As a freelance writer she writes for top technology brands, including IBM, HPE, Adobe, AT&T, Verizon, Epson, Oracle, Intel and Square. She specializes in a wide range of technology, such as AI, IoT, cloud, cybersecurity, and CX. Jennifer also wrote a bestselling book The Freelance Content Marketing Writer to help other writers launch a high earning freelance business.
sponsored sponsored content
scotus
Climate

Supreme Court takes a sledgehammer to greenhouse gas regulations

The court ruled 6-3 that the EPA cannot use the Clean Air Act to regulate power plant greenhouse gas emissions. That leaves a patchwork of policies from states, utilities and, increasingly, tech companies to pick up the slack.

The Supreme Court struck a major blow to the federal government's ability to regulate greenhouse gases.

Eric Lee/Bloomberg via Getty Images

Striking down the right to abortion may be the Supreme Court's highest-profile decision this term. But on Thursday, the court handed down an equally massive verdict on the federal government's ability to regulate greenhouse gas emissions. In the case of West Virginia v. EPA, the court decided that the agency has no ability to regulate greenhouse gas pollution under the Clean Air Act. Weakening the federal government's powers leaves a patchwork of states, utilities and, increasingly, tech companies to pick up the slack in reducing carbon pollution.

Keep Reading Show less
Brian Kahn

Brian ( @blkahn) is Protocol's climate editor. Previously, he was the managing editor and founding senior writer at Earther, Gizmodo's climate site, where he covered everything from the weather to Big Oil's influence on politics. He also reported for Climate Central and the Wall Street Journal. In the even more distant past, he led sleigh rides to visit a herd of 7,000 elk and boat tours on the deepest lake in the U.S.

epa supreme court scotus
crypto regulation
Fintech

Can crypto regulate itself? The Lummis-Gillibrand bill hopes so.

Creating the equivalent of the stock markets’ FINRA for crypto is the ideal, but experts doubt that it will be easy.

The idea of creating a government-sanctioned private regulatory association has been drawing more attention in the debate over how to rein in a fast-growing industry whose technological quirks have baffled policymakers.

Illustration: Christopher T. Fong/Protocol

Regulating crypto is complicated. That’s why Sens. Cynthia Lummis and Kirsten Gillibrand want to explore the creation of a private sector group to help federal regulators do their job.

The bipartisan bill introduced by Lummis and Gillibrand would require the CFTC and the SEC to work with the crypto industry to look into setting up a self-regulatory organization to “facilitate innovative, efficient and orderly markets for digital assets.”

Keep Reading Show less
Benjamin Pimentel

Benjamin Pimentel ( @benpimentel) covers crypto and fintech from San Francisco. He has reported on many of the biggest tech stories over the past 20 years for the San Francisco Chronicle, Dow Jones MarketWatch and Business Insider, from the dot-com crash, the rise of cloud computing, social networking and AI to the impact of the Great Recession and the COVID crisis on Silicon Valley and beyond. He can be reached at bpimentel@protocol.com or via Google Voice at (925) 307-9342.

self-regulatory organization cryptocurrency lummis-gillibrand bill sro finra sec cftc crypto regulation
cybersecurity
Enterprise

Alperovitch: Cybersecurity defenders can’t be on high alert every day

With the continued threat of Russian cyber escalation, cybersecurity and geopolitics expert Dmitri Alperovitch says it’s not ideal for the U.S. to oscillate between moments of high alert and lesser states of cyber readiness.

Dmitri Alperovitch (the co-founder and former CTO of CrowdStrike) speaks at RSA Conference 2022.

Photo: RSA Conference

When it comes to cybersecurity vigilance, Dmitri Alperovitch wants to see more focus on resiliency of IT systems — and less on doing "surges" around particular dates or events.

For instance, whatever Russia is doing at the moment.

Keep Reading Show less
Kyle Alspach

Kyle Alspach ( @KyleAlspach) is a senior reporter at Protocol, focused on cybersecurity. He has covered the tech industry since 2010 for outlets including VentureBeat, CRN and the Boston Globe. He lives in Portland, Oregon, and can be reached at kalspach@protocol.com.

cyberattacks dmitri alperovitch russia security ukraine cybersecurity
Latest Stories
Bulletins