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Welcome to the Cloud Wars Minute<\/a> \u2014 your daily cloud news and commentary show. Each episode provides insights and perspectives around the \u201creimagination machine\u201d that is the cloud.<\/p>\n In today\u2019s Cloud Wars Minute, I examine why SAP\u2019s biggest competitive challenge may soon come from OpenAI and Anthropic rather than traditional enterprise software rivals.<\/p>\n Highlights <\/p>\n 00:00 \u2014 SAP released its Q2 numbers last week, and a couple of interesting things happened there. First of all, strong Q2 cloud revenue growth, 24%. But even higher than that was its backlog growth, which went up 26%. CEO Christian Klein tied that specifically to the company\u2019s transformation, started about two years ago, to shift more and more of the sales effort from the direct channel to the indirect channel.<\/p>\n 00:56 \u2014 It had resellers whose big concern a number of years ago was, \u201cWell, what margin am I going to get? What discount do I get?\u201d Today, the focus, through the efforts of Chief Partner Officer Karl Fahrbach <\/a>and Klein, has shifted very, very much toward, \u201cHow do we get successful outcomes? How do we ensure these AI deployments happen smoothly, rapidly, and effectively at the customer site?\u201d<\/p>\n 01:29 \u2014 It\u2019s about $7.2 billion. Within that, the Cloud ERP Suite<\/a> was up 27% to $6.4 billion, and the current cloud backlog, that 26% jump, pushed it to $26.3 billion. It said growth for full-year 2026 will be somewhere between 23% and 25%. I\u2019ve penciled it in here as 24%, and that will come in right at about $30 billion.<\/p>\n Community Summit North America<\/a> is the largest independent innovation, education, and training event for Microsoft business applications delivered by Expert Users, Microsoft Leaders, MVPs, and Partners. Register now<\/a> to attend Community Summit in Nashville, TN from October 11-15. <\/p>\n 02:28 \u2014 Klein said, \u201cThe growth for our indirect channel in Q2 again significantly outpaced our direct channel growth,\u201d and this reflects, he said, a successful go-to-market transformation. He has revised the company\u2019s leadership, its product portfolio, the impression the market has about ERP and what SAP Cloud ERP means, and how the whole notion at the highest level of the autonomous enterprise sinks in.<\/p>\n 04:20 \u2014 Now there\u2019s enterprise applications, agents, AI, and data vendors, and this growth streak it\u2019s had in the mid-20s has been very impressive. So the biggest challenge SAP has going forward will come, in some form that\u2019s unclear right now, from OpenAI and Anthropic, and exactly how those they are going to parlay their early focus on models into the whole agentic AI movement in the agents and workflow space.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Welcome to the Cloud Wars Minute \u2014 your daily cloud news and commentary show. Each episode provides insights…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":66292,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[21036],"tags":[22551,6409,23163,2828,3216,22553,9695],"class_list":["post-66291","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-sap","tag-agent","tag-ai","tag-anthropic","tag-data","tag-featured","tag-openai","tag-sap"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/germany\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/66291","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/germany\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/germany\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/germany\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/germany\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=66291"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/germany\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/66291\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/germany\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/66292"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/germany\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=66291"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/germany\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=66291"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/germany\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=66291"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}![\"\"](\"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/germany\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/06\/Speciality-Summit-NA-Nashville-2026-1024x516.png\")
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