SAP SE (SAP) Earnings Call Transcript & Summary

Good afternoon, everyone, and welcome to our financial analyst conference. We hope you're enjoying Sapphire so far. It's been an exceptional event, and this is our signature event, and I hope you're enjoying the program. It's always a great way to talk with customers and partners and talk innovation. And we have more than 12,000 customers on the show floor. So glad. We are glad you are here. It's a full house, and we have a great agenda for you today. I also want to welcome people watching online from around the world. Welcome. Last year, we provided an update on our 2025 ambition. And we shared our confidence into the growth trajectory of the company, the execution and where we're heading in terms of innovation. So today will be a refresh on those topics and build on that momentum that we are seeing in the business. So we have a great agenda for you today. We will start with our CEO, Christian Klein, giving you an update on the vision and the strategy. Obviously, we will then go into the products, and Muhammad Alam, our newest addition to the Board, will provide you with some insights into our product strategy, our portfolio and how this is building on the innovation front. Then we'll have Scott Russell, the Head of Customer Success, providing you with some update on the go-to-market strategy and how did that translate for our customers with some showcase. Then Julia White will provide some discussion or will explain a bit, our commercial approach, and will provide some updates on how we are landing and expanding with our customers. And then obviously, last but not least, we will have Dominik Asam, our CFO, providing you more insight into our financials and about the outlook going forward. And so then we'll take a short break, and we'll have an Executive Board Q&A live here, so you will be able to ask questions to the Board directly. And before we start, I'd like to do the safe harbor. So during this presentation, we will make forward-looking statements which are predictions, projections or other statements about future events. These statements are based on current expectations and assumptions that are subject to risks and uncertainties that could cause actual results and outcomes to materially differ. Additional information regarding these risks and uncertainties may be found in our filings with the Securities and Exchange Commission, including but not limited to the Risk Factors section of SAP's annual report on Form 20-F for 2023. And with that, with no further ado, I welcome our CEO, Christian Klein. Christian, congrats on a great keynote yesterday, and welcome. Take it away.

Okay. Welcome to all of you here live in Orlando. And of course, also a very warm welcome to all the people joining us virtually. I'm not sure how about you, but I took purposely some time and just walked over the show floors. And I hope you can feel the same, the energy, the passion of our customers walking by. And when I feel the mood -- and Sapphire is always a little bit like speed dating, 30 minutes customers, the next customer/partner. But I have to say when I compare this, even to last year, again, I see a very, very positive momentum in our ecosystem. And for me, it's very important, first of all to you: What we promise, we are going to deliver, that is true for the financials, but it's also true with regard to product and AI. And what we have shown yesterday at the keynote, it's of course very important that the vision comes across, but it's also very important that now also the reality follows and that the customers can see, yes, SAP is also delivering, and we see also the business outcome. Today, I would love to guide you through a bit why do we believe, so strongly believe, that you're also going to see accelerated growth not only this year, next year, but also in the years to come. I mean, first, when you look at the tech stack, look, this was not easy, but I have to say kudos to our 40,000 developers. I mean, first, to arrive from the past to the present. I mean, 4 years back, the tech stack was not really cohesive. Now I can claim and I can say with confidence that this is one of the most modern tech stacks in our industry. And why is that? First, you see the data in the middle. It spans across, the applications talk to each other. Now it's the UX, already harmonized across. It's 95% perfect. The rest of the 5%, we will get done, Muhammad. But it's really a different world. And I'm a big believer that the best of suite will win. And modular best of suite, not the monolithic best of suite. And I come to that in a moment, how this will unfold also in accelerated growth on the go-to-market side. And Julia will talk about the commercials, how this then come all together. Of course, no tech confluence without generative AI. We will -- I will also talk about that. But for us, it's very important that we are not dancing on every party, but that we also keep the focus on generative AI, where can SAP really play in this game? Where can we unfold a ton of value? And when you have 300 million end users live in your systems, it's actually pretty clear. You need to infuse generate AI into your copilot, you need to infuse it into the business processes, and you have to connect it with your data, where I believe we have the biggest data treasure in the industry, and this is what we are going to now unfold. If we then move on. 3, 4 years back, there was a lot of questioning around Wise. I guess it became very clear also now with the evolution of Wise, that the customers get an immense value. I mean, when you talk to customers like Hitachi High-Tech or Microsoft. You can also talk to Amazon, we had on stage. Or Exxon or ConocoPhillips. I mean, for Conoco or Hitachi in the meantime, it's not anymore an upgrade, it's an update. And we won the largest companies on this planet, and really infusing every quarter, every year, new innovations into the system landscape. And why do we do that? Because they are not only investing hundreds of millions in the next ERP upgrade. We are going step by step. We are not only moving them into the cloud. We apply our best practices from over 25 industries and really talk about them about the business model. With Nike, we talked to them about how we can improve the costing, how to take the complexity out. And then really, to really make sure that, on the one hand side, they get really the value on the business, but also the agility on the IT side. And that we -- how I call it lately that we are not doing this open heart surgeries anymore in every 10 years, but that you're not hosting your ERP, but that you are transforming. And then when Microsoft is then live with IPP, or Janssen. I mean, we don't need to convince these people. They are coming because they are convinced that SAP has great solutions. And when you see what, for example, our IPP, our demand and supply chain planning solution does and you compare it to this reactive very transactional module in the ECC or in the on-premise world, and now you can see how you get the demand signals. And then on the other side, you can have the real-time numbers on your warehouses. You get the latest stats on your suppliers, are they able to deliver? And then if we can tell Jensen, we connect the whole semiconductor industry via the Business Network, then it works. And then the business case is there, and this is why it's so important. But again, all hands up, all hands down, there is work to do. And the work is not only to be done on the tech side. I talked about Thomas' mission going forward to really be with our customers and our partners even more closely to deliver these outcomes. And then sustainability. I mean, depending on which region you are in the world, sustainability is high or maybe not so high anymore in the agenda, we believe in it. We believe that we can, with the Green Ledger, store the data. But we can also actually solve some of the topics, issues around Scope 2 and Scope 3, and that we can infuse this data. When you have seen the keynote yesterday, when you are now making procurement decisions, you not only have the cost, the quality of a supplier, you also have the carbon footprint of a supplier to make holistic decisions. And on the sustainability side, it's for us, very important that we play also into the European Green Deal, on the European green taxes, because regulatory will come no matter how the election turns out. And we are partnering a lot with also content providers who make sure that our sustainability control now in our solutions really also adhere to CPAM and all of these regulations which are coming on the horizon. Accelerated growth beyond 2027 means focus. You have seen doing some very reasonable, I would say meaningful, tuck-in acquisitions. We can talk about some of that, also what happened this morning. But you also saw SAP divesting. So we don't need to acquire for accelerated revenue growth. And sometimes we also had to divest in order to keep the focus. Because in a 1-hour keynote at SAP, sometimes you feel, hey, you're really covering a EUR 700 billion market. And that's enough growth. And -- but we also have to make sure that we are focusing on the places where we can win and that we are staying the #1 that's focused. On scale, when I hear Muhammad talking about the best of suite, this is music to my ears because that is when it comes together. Why should actually, when you land with BTP and finance, then -- just I had a customer said, "Christian, I saw Workday, Coupa. I mean, I really want to make sure. You are so good on features, you are even better on AI and everything comes out of the box. Why should I not consolidate on SAP in the places where I see that you are running my core business processes end to end? And you don't have to only you buy a piece of software, now it talks to each other, it sticks and it really makes sure that I can run my company in a harmonized, integrated manner." And then last but not least, innovation. I mean, when we talk about our copilot tool, when we talk about embedded AI. Yes, I will talk about it, what we're going to enable. But it's not about -- only about the number of AI use cases. And I know your question around how can we build incremental revenue streams. In SAP, our whole portfolio will accelerate because we are embedding it. And when you sell SuccessFactors these days, or procurement, or finance, or supply chain, AI is a part of the game. When you look at our demos, you see AI embedded. And yes, sometimes it's embedded in the standard subscription, but sometimes you have to pay a premium according to the value. And there are our value engineers, and there is Philip's team with the discovery team to make sure our customers also understand what kind of impact it will have on their P&L, on their CapEx. Talking about focus. Number one, it's for us very important. You have seen us divesting Litmos, a few other things. Qualtrics was a bigger one. It's not core when you are not #1. Let's really think about it. If it's not core to the business processes of our customers, if it's not necessarily also where our [ IP ] sees us, question mark. But where we are playing, we want to be the #1. And then when you then talk about business AI, it goes both hands. You need to be #1 in order to have the data. When you have the data, you can be the #1 in business AI and the other way around. So if you want to play and stay the #1, you have to infuse that. Because in the future, when you work with our solutions, there will be proactive recommendations. There will be prefilled templates in HR. There will be prefilled RFPs in our procurement solutions. So it's really embedded and all our solutions will win, and it goes both ways. If we then talk about the market itself, it's a EUR 700 billion market. You have seen us for the first time reporting our cloud ERP number. Why cloud ERP and not S/4 anymore? Cloud ERP is everything, what you see. And we land with Business Technology Platform, with our finance, and then we're going to expand it to our lines of businesses. And that's the winning formula. And what we are going to see, that we are growing this business by over 30%. And we are very, very confident that we can sustain this kind of performance and this kind of growth because it's getting sourced from two fields. One is our installed base, and the second one is also, of course, there are many, many new customers now also joining SAP. If we then move on, this is actually now with regard to focus our goal to be the #1 business AI company. I announced yesterday that Joule needs to now span across our portfolio. It's very, very important. So when you're working in Hire to Retire and Source to Pay and you ask Joule one thing on sourcing. Then when you go downstream into Source to Pay, Joule needs to be on your side. So the coverage is very, very important. But it's also important, the 300 million users that we have the telemetry data so that not we are just automating blindly. No, we are automating the right tasks, but broadly, so that Joule is your constant copilot when you're working with SAP software. With Jensen and NVIDIA, we announced the ABAP Developer. and that's actually for me, huge. When you think about, when we have a problem, maybe these days, it's the ecosystem because the pipeline, the projects super strong. Now you have to have the people who are driving this change. We alone can't do it. We need our partners. And it's where we use well-skilled SAP consultants, yes, we have them, we are working on that. But ABAP for Developer and ABAP for Consultant, you're sitting there. You're going into a design phase of your transformation. And now suddenly, Joule for Consultant comes in and says, "Hey, your Quote to Cash," what you Joule tells you, "These are the best business models for your industry. Let me show you how to redesign it. Let me show you how to configure the system." And then when you do the code scan and you see all this custom code, you don't need a ton of consultants anymore to replicate this code, no. You use Joule for Developer to replicate this code and auto generate this code on BTP. So it's pure efficiency. And on the other hand, it's pure acceleration to the move to the cloud ERP. And this is in beta and the first results are really good. Then when we talk about the ecosystem. We know for a fact that we cannot build everything by our own, and we shouldn't. That's why, with our Gen AI Hub, we thought a lot about how can we differentiate? When we get questions around on which LLM model you are betting, there is not clear #1, so we want to give flexibility. We have give a broad set of large language models or you can bring your own module. We have a lot of pharma companies, a lot of companies like Samsung who maybe don't want to put all their data into a public cloud large language model. So bring your own model, but we give you the same access into our data and into our security layer like when you would use any kind of public LLM model. That's our Gen AI Hub. The partners are building the first use cases. Again, where we're good? PwC, I mentioned one yesterday. The differentiating factors. Why SAP Business AI? First, we have, in the meantime, over 30,000 customers who gave us consent to use the data in an anonymized way and train our algorithm. So what our Head of AI, Philipp Herzig, and his team is doing, they are building this AI foundation where we put all of this data in and give it a meaning. Meaning means we are training this data. We are cross-correlating this data. So that Joule, when you're doing a sourcing or a financial decision, can also take HR data into account, supply chain data. All the data that you need to make smarter decisions at the end of the day. And this is why this is so, so important, that we have access to the data, that we understand what is happening. Next one is out of the box. So even if you're a Wise customer, we're going to make sure that all the embedded AI use cases can be also consumed out of the box. In the public cloud, it's like no one needs to do anything. You ideally don't even feel if AI is embedded in the business process, it's just way more intelligent. Compliance checks for travel, for sourcing, done. No human intervention. I already talked about the choice of the best LLM modules. We are working. Barcelona also, we're going to welcome Mistral on stage. We have also big plans there for Europe. Mistral will join us in Barcelona to talk about -- more about this partnership. And then yes, standard identity security, it's super important. So also what I talked yesterday about the UNESCO principles, it's very important for us that our algorithms, that they are transparent, that our customers can understand what we are doing with Business AI and that they the right outcome also according to certain human or other social standards. Scalability. There is really One SAP now. And I cannot say how happy I am when I attend this Sapphire, when you are walking across the show floors, you suddenly see procurement where it's not Ariba or S/4, it's a procurement platform with embedded tool, BTP for extension data, 360 spend, Control Tower. And there are different engineering teams, but they are engineering towards one architecture. And it's easily said, it's not so easily done. And when I talk -- Muhammad, when he talks about first, it's about best of suite, that's it. And the next one, what we are going to tackle is also now the workflow. Why would you put another workflow layer on top, if you can activate our workflow? We pre-fill it with content from us, from our partners. So this is the best of suite. When you go Fieldglass on HR and you do total workforce, in conjunction with finance, it comes out of one. And then, of course, Julia and Scott have now a much better product foundation to commercialize it. And then you don't not only commercialize and you buy something, but it also comes as one. And then you understand, maybe I are reducing a little bit more best of tweed and are expanding a little bit more on SAP with best of suite. And trust me, this is a super important factor when you are running enterprises at scale. Wise, I like this graph a lot because it shows the methodology and it's super important. I would say sometimes to customers, before you spend hundreds of millions for your next ERP upgrade, think twice about how you want to do that. And please, please, please follow a certain methodology. The fit to standard. When we say we're now going to assign an enterprise architect, your new best friend, your new best friend is sitting together with your partner of choice, but making sure that when you are moving into the migration phase, you are very, very clear what you want to achieve on the business layer on the business process layer. And that we are also very, very clear around how much custom code modifications will be left. And then when you move into move and deploy, that the North Star architecture is clear, that you are clear about, hey, with BTP, I have an integration suite where I don't need custom integration with Mulesoft or Boomi. Or whatever you do, this is all where we cumbersome and very expensive. No. I have standard integration coming out of the box with a semantical data layer. And even for non-SAP applications, we have a very, very powerful API layer. The extension, how to code on BTP, Joule for developer, you see how this comes together. You can accelerate your move. And then even companies like large, large companies with a lot of complexity in their business model see that we can move them with Wise to a certain extent into our public cloud ERP. And yes, there may be pieces who stay in the private cloud because of the complexity, but we won it as one. and we update it as one and we infuse innovation as one. That's Wise with SAP. EUR 11 billion support revenue conversion, very good. We are super disciplined on price. That's good. So the conversion factor remains high and also the upside on the extensibility side. Once you go into move and you code, you start coding. You have seen yesterday Apple, I mean, how great is that? We don't even need to say them what to say. I mean, they are saying what they do with BTP because it's a very powerful platform to build enhancements to our ERP. Business transformation offering. Yes, tools are very important. And Signavio was a great acquisition both from a product and a cultural perspective. So we did LeanIX, there was one piece missing for the people. And in the cloud, it's all about adoption. And then we saw this company called -- I always say Hummingbird. This was our internal code name, but it's not anymore the bird. It's WalkMe. And why are we so convinced about WalkMe? Because WalkMe was part of the Concur and the Ariba ecosystem already, and we got very, very, very good feedback because we could ensure much higher end user adoption. We are guiding the users not only for Concur, but now we are to -- we can guide them across end-to-end processes, like Travel to Expand. And now we are going to expand that. WalkMe will be infused into all of our products. It will be our one end user enablement tool for our whole portfolio. And what we want to do, of course, we want to do money with this business, but there is an overarching goal, it's to drive more end-user adoption, higher adoption, better renewal rates and higher upsell rates. And then if you can infuse AI with all of the knowledge, what we are having coming from our products, I mean it's the perfect fit. So we cover the process with Signavio; we cover with LeanIX, the architecture system data; and we cover with WalkMe, the people, the end user. And this is what we are integrating. And then when the enterprise architecture, our partners walk to a customer, they have their own knowledge, but they have the perfect tool chain to say, "Hey, let's really go in with Wise with SAP." GROW. The teams did a fantastic job to also announce now at Sapphire that we are landing with BTP and finance, but you can -- if you want to add sales, if you want to add travel, you click a button and here it is. We can provision it out of the box. You can run it out of the box. So it's like when I play with my son Lego at home, it's like, you put one brick at another and it works and it fits. Ideally, it fit. But we put it in the right way together. The engineers really work really, really hard. And now the commercial model and the way how we also sell it via our partners and our ecosystem, the enablement to land and expand is there. And the 60% net new customer share is super important to attract new customers, like [ ByD ] and others. But also many smaller ones who hopefully become a unicorn, who hopefully become a large enterprise. And it's -- it's a great play, and it's an ecosystem play to also do it with the right efficiency and with the right cost margins at the end of the day. Yes, the land and expand. I mean, we have seen a lot of our top customers, especially those ones who are on the Wise journey for quite some time. They land and expand more than 4 solutions. We have top 1,000 customers, they already now have 4 in play. There's more to come. But you see also there is still room for upside. And that's why it's so important to play into this land and expand. And the better we become on the product side, and we are super good, the more of course we also have the chance then to expand our footprint. And this is a significant cross-sell and upsell potential. So we have the EUR 11 billion of support revenue. We land, we convert it with 2x to 3x conversion factor. We have the extension platform where we have sometimes 7x more custom code. And then we actually can even then expand our footprint with the land and expand motion. If we then move on the innovation side. I mean, we talked about AI already. I talked about a consultant and the ABAP Developer. I talked about WalkMe, who plays into for the Chief Information Officer to get better tools for end user adoption. We have the Chief Operating Officer. I mean, supply chain is a great area. I mean IBP demand and supply, of course with high demand, but we are also now seeing like manufacturing cloud, transportation management in the cloud, logistics. It's really, really picking up. We are just at the beginning and that we can say, hey, we really manage your whole Design to Operate process. Again, it's super strong. Because when we talk about personalized supply chains, to personalize your shoe, you need a commerce system where you -- but then it needs to go into the design, into the manufacturing. And ideally, you can ship the shoe next day. And this is what we can do out of the box. You can configure a car, Mercedes. You can manufacture, you can transport, you do the logistics end-to-end. Warehousing, everything is integrated, Design to Operate. Chief Financial Officer. When I look at the guided buying, I mean, this is like direct, indirect. You have full control with your control tower, Spend Control Tower, obviously also the Sustainability Control Tower. As I mentioned at the beginning, I mean when I talk to Dominik, we talk about the financials, but we also talk about the nonfinancials. So it's also important to increase the transparency there and also prove that we are taking action. And this is where we can play around the ESG data and what I explained to also connecting Scope 2 and Scope 3. And of course, a big focus will be on the regulatory reporting requirements for our customers. And then Chief Human Resources. I mean, I have worked for SuccessFactors. 2012. I just talked yesterday to Lars Dalgaard. And I said, "Lars, you wouldn't imagine. When you want to see this product now, it's one platform, it's one UX. When you work with it, every persona is immediately understands how to use the solution. In AI, we are leading, no matter if you do recruiting or you are a person in a shared service center or you are doing compensation or are you doing performance management, it's great to see how much the team already infused the AI." And then the analytics. When you use Fieldglass and EC. You wouldn't imagine, with Gina, how often we look these days with our restructuring program, which by the way, runs well. We are looking at our workforce, internal, external, skills. Do we have enough architect? Do we have enough AI data scientists? What do we need coming also from pipeline from go-to-market? How do we need to change our workforce? And when you see how this works from a total workforce perspective, with SuccessFactors and Fieldglass, we are more than back in the game with regard to the Chief Human Resource Officer. So why do we strongly believe? And I have a lot of confidence that you're going to see in accelerating total revenue growth also beyond 2027. Dominik will talk about all the revenue mix effects which are now playing into our favor, but from a business and strategy point of view. We have the EUR 11 billion. And when I walk here around and meet our customers, they are all now saying, "Christian, we got you on Wise. We know it's not the right thing to only host. We need to transform. We are with you in that." And this EUR 11 billion gives us still a lot of runway. When you look at our total cloud backlog, the EUR 44 billion, I guess we reported, is you also see what is still in the ramp, in the backlog to be delivered. But we are delivering really well. This clean core, this don't custom, don't only put money into the services basket, standardize and differentiate by building the extensions on BTP, huge upside. GROW. There were 3 to 4 years after the failure of ByDesign where we were definitely not playing so well in the mid-market. Now we are back, and we are stronger than ever because a lot of even mid-market customers now say, "Hey, when I need to scale, when I want to globalize my business, SAP can do with GROW over 70 countries. Why should I rely on best of breed where I have to stitch everything together where I cannot really also support the growth plans I have as a mid-market company with huge ambitions? And that is GROW, and it comes out of the box. The cross-sell. Yes, there are a few products who will be below 15% growth, our aspiration, let's really get them all above 15% growth. And the ones who are maybe on a stand-alone basis, still not at the 15%. Again, land and expand, package. Because we can actually run this end-to-end. And then suddenly, also from a stand-alone perspective, while you have some competition, when you then package it and go for the best of suite, suddenly, the customers are saying yes. Now we go end to end, we land and expand, and that will really boost our cross-sell capabilities a lot and really also will lift the growth rates also for the product, for the very few products who are not yet at 15% growth, to a level where you maybe even have seen our best-performing products. Leader in business AI. It's a huge market. We commercialize it really well. Not overly aggressive, but we commercialize it, that it really helps us to boost our whole portfolio. Yes, some traditional AI, machine learning, predictive is embedded in the standard subscription. But in the meantime, all of our premium offering, our premium packages, where we really then also add our higher value generating cases. And this is, of course, what then we are going to sell and commercialize again when we are selling our holistic portfolio. And this is -- will be a huge boost for our total revenue number as well. So net-net, and I'm absolutely right on time, I can say, coming out here now of almost 2 days Sapphire, it gives me even more confidence. The customers are super positive. It's more like a discussion around, hey, how we can innovate and transform with SAP. There's no discussion anymore around the best of suite and the integration and the extension. They all see that and they believe it, and they see the vision, but they also see how we turn this vision into reality. And that's why, again, we are so confident to also accelerate our total revenue beyond 2027. Thanks. Thanks for coming here to Orlando. Thanks to all of the people who are joining us virtually. And now back to -- or over to Muhammad. Muhammad, please.

So I don't actually realize -- I don't know why I have a session here today because we just spent all day yesterday showing you all the product and technology stuff that we're doing and Christian did just such a phenomenal job walking through all the innovation as well. But that said, I do have some content I'll explain and go through. So I'll start with, since this is my first time here with you guys, maybe a little bit of an introduction. I've been with SAP about 2 years -- a little over 2 years. I started after about an 8-month discussion with Thomas and Christian when I was at Microsoft joining SAP. And ran, when I joined SAP about 2 years ago, our intelligent spend and business network, product and engineering area, which includes Ariba, Concur, Fieldglass and SAP Business Network, one of our larger SaaS business area from a product perspective. And then about a couple of months ago, I joined product engineering. When I was at Microsoft, I ran our Dynamics 365 product and engineering end to end, which included our customer engagement applications, which are obviously one of the market [ I think storing our there ]. Customer engagement applications, which were one of the market leading ones, and the ERP applications. And over the course of the 4, 5 years in Dynamics 365 journey, we took a business that was largely on-prem, brought it to the cloud. And I think for those that do follow Microsoft, particularly business applications, took that to be a multibillion-dollar business from that perspective. And then if you rewind the clock many years even before that, I actually started my journey with Ernst & Young, which then later sold consulting to Capgemini, in ERP implementation. So I did ERP implementations for some of our largest customers. But Oracle at the time, which I didn't know I was going to end up here at SAP. So I did apologize to Christian, didn't touch it after that. But, it's kind of ironic. What I tell people, at least my team is, since then, I've been with business application and largely only ERP up until, ironically, I joined SAP. And I had this 2-year stint where I only did spend management and not ERP. So I am excited now to be back in the core of it, running all products, including ERP, too. So that's my background. What I thought I'd do today is a few things because for hopefully those that were part of the sessions yesterday, either online or in person, you saw the keynotes and some of the demos that are out there as well. I wanted to take some more time just to explain maybe a few of the principles and thought process behind, from a product perspective, why we're investing where we're investing. And we can talk about some of the progress that we're making as well, which you've seen either in the shape of demos already or some of what Christian talked about. But before I get on to them, I think it's important to realize, I feel from a business application perspective, we're sort of at a crossroads of three things coming together which are very opportunistic and very advantageous for SAP. Thing number one is I do believe there's a generational shift that's happening in the minds of customers that are running large monolithic on-prem ERP applications to say, "Hey, now is the time for us to move that to the cloud and figure out how we modernize that landscape." Because the confidence level in moving some of those workloads into the cloud is now at a point where they feel like we can get to the cloud in a way that they can go manage, run and find resilient applications. So that's thing number one, which is where a lot of our customers are. Thing number two is of course that desire to move to the cloud has now been accelerated by the pervasiveness and the potential of AI, which I would argue, up until 2 years ago, people had heard AI, but it was more of a hype factor as opposed to people really believe that it can really deliver significant across the board, across the business, process benefits, if you will. So that's also sort of creating this urgency alongside thing number one, to say, we have to get to something that's modern so we can really realize the benefit of AI. Because it's really hard to go do that in a landscape that's on-prem, monolithic, very hard to adjust and very hard to change. And then the final thing, which Christian touched on for us from an SAP perspective, I think, is very opportunistic as well, is the work that the teams have done over the last couple of years in taking the platform, aligning then the UX, modernizing the stack that Christian talked about and really bringing the suite together in an integrated, but still yet composable manner, is at the right point for us to really help our customers accelerate this journey onto SAP. So if you think about these three things coming together, it sort of explains the growth rate that we see from a cloud ERP suite perspective of 30%-plus. And really, the desire is, if you don't get to it, the reason why you can't benefit from AI and the value of AI is you just can't upgrade and consume innovation that's now happening at a pace on a daily basis, if you will. Because if you look at Hitachi High-Tech's case, in a non-cloud world, they could actually only afford to upgrade every 5 years, and it took 18 months to get to that end state after that upgrade. In a cloud, you go from not doing upgrades but doing updates, which is a far different mindset, right? It's an operating model change for organizations that go from, not sort of being in the business of implementing systems, but delivering value back to the organization in a modular and evergreen manner. We spoke to some of our most strategic and marquee customers yesterday and talked about two concepts, which is sort of where the world is moving to, where customers want to get to. That concept is, from my perspective, the phrase that I use is getting to the cloud is literally the last ERP implementation that you'll ever do. Like that's the concept and that's what customers are doing, because once you do this last ERP implementation, you will never have to go do that again, particularly if you do it correctly in the cloud world, if you will. From there, you sort of get to this -- I'll steal this from one of my colleagues, persistent innovative state. Because what you do then is, the 40,000 people that we have, that are working on driving innovation literally on a daily basis, you are able to consume that without any breaking changes and deliver value back to your organization. A great example of that is a large automotive customer that shall go nameless because I didn't get the approval for it in advance. But they said, hey, with AI, they've been able to reduce the receipt-matching work that they do at their docks to a point that, in one location only, they could reduce it by 20 people, 20 FTEs that they can go reallocate in other places. And they're so excited about that. But at the same time, they're really not as excited because they've got so many other locations, and they're still in the process of rolling out Cloud ERP. That benefit, they can scale for another 3 years to all of those locations because they sit in an environment that looks like it's monolithic and on-prem. So the journey to get to the cloud is just so important for them so they can start really getting benefit of that on a daily basis, not just one scenario. There's many others that were shipping and working on, like Christian talked about, like hundreds, we've got 50 out there now, 100 by the end of the year. And Christian signed us up for a lot more, which we're going to go deliver from a product perspective, too. So anyhow, this confluence of factors, if you will, the generational shift on getting to a cloud ERP; the urgency driven by AI; and the fact that we believe our products are now sort of the modern intelligent, modular and integrated with the right user experience on top, just happens to come at a time where we're seeing the right momentum. And that's why you see the energy at the Sapphire floor. And the thing that, from an SAP perspective, to me, is highly differentiating for us, is we are probably the only ones in this market that provide the right optionality to customers on how do you want to move to the cloud, depending on the level of complexity, scale or where you're coming from. So for our largest, most complex in our installed base, we have a solution with private cloud that says, if that's what you want, we'll help you get there. Because it's very hard for a Microsoft or a BMW -- actually, I did have approval to use BMW, and Boston Scientific, that you can't really run in a very multi-tenanted environment because the business is so complex and so diverse, that you have to have something that you can really go manage in a way that makes sense for you. And we are one of the only ones that provide that option in a way that's still cloud-safe with a clean core so you can consume the update. So it's still the last ERP implementation that you'll ever do, but then you can be part of the co-innovation. You can be part of the consuming the innovation and the value from it on a going basis. But if you don't have that level of complexity and you want to operate in a public cloud, which is still, again, intelligent, it's networked, it's highly extensible, you can go to the public cloud option as well. And a lot of our customers are selecting that as well, of all sizes from the spectrum. Ones which have a simple-enough profile that can go live in 10 weeks, to ones like PwC that we talked about that are also doubling down on the public cloud because they feel like that model works best for them. And this optionality is what I believe is also unique from an SAP perspective, which helps address the need of customers wanting to move as opposed to, hey, we want to move. We want to take advantage of AI, but we don't want to be forced-fitted into a model. And that's where SAP sort of provides this, think of this as a ladder of options for them to get to. But I thought what I'd do now. So hopefully, most of you have seen the keynotes, so you've seen the innovations that we're landing. And if not, I think those are going to be available. But maybe take a step back and explain in super simple terms, this is how I think, on where we're investing, where we're driving innovation, if you will. And I sort of break that into two simple categories. One is the how and the other is the what. The how is, as Christian explained, how we're helping customers get to that persistent innovative state as quickly and as predictably as possible. We as SAP are one of the only ones that are investing in that full life cycle in a way so we can help carry that demand that's there, that significant demand, to that end state as quickly as possible. And there's a lot of investment there, one we announced this morning that helps with that as well. The second part is when you get there, what is the value that you unlock from the applications that you're on? That's the what. And we're investing in both, which I think is also largely very unique. So let's look at the investments from a how perspective. This picture, hopefully, you've seen it was in Christian's slide deck as well. Going from your current state to what the modular cloud ERP is, you go through this process. I thought what I do, if that's okay with you, because I don't know how many of you have actually gone through an ERP implementation. It's not something you'd want to wish on a friend, but generally, people who have done it are just so thrilled and addicted to it, they do it over and over again. Because when you get there, it's actually pretty fulfilling. That's what I told my wife, at least, and that's why I've lost a lot of my hair. I don't know how Christian's kept his hair, right? But if you sort of break this down in super simple terms again. From starting with the current state, what you have to understand is how are your business processes set up? How do you want to optimize it? Because what you don't want to do is bring the c*** that you have into the future state because then you're not going to be able to sort of get the value that you want to get. So you want to understand your processes, figure out how you want to enhance them, make them better, and then move it to your destination, the persistent innovative state, if you will. So that's one thing you need to go do. The other thing you need to go do is you need to understand, largely speaking, in an environment that hasn't been updated in decades, you'll have your core ERP, but you also have a bunch of applications that, sometimes you know, most times you don't, that you want to get that inventory in that landscape. So as you're designing your future state, you actually simplify your landscape because unless you do that, again, you can't truly get the value and the benefit from it because your data stays segregated. So you have to understand what your full application landscape looks like. And then, of course, these projects are complicated. So you actually truly need orchestration through this whole process that not just allows you to track status, but guides you on what's the next thing you need to go do. And how do you assess, what are the things you just did, you've done it in an effective way. Governance structure for solution complexity and quality. Now a lot of what people did in the first cycle of the implementation, as I think we pointed out in one of the keynotes today, I think Scott said that, is even at SAP -- or Thomas said it because he was the CIO here. Like we at SAP have like millions of lines of custom code as well. So you need some governance around, when you move to this end state, do you really need to customize stuff? And let's say you do, there's things that are just unique to you. Then how should you do it? Which is the next place, which is kind of where BTP comes in and a bunch of other things come in. Because we're not saying that the move to the cloud means that you have to look like your next-door neighbor because that just doesn't exist from an ERP perspective. But the question is, how do you bring your uniqueness in a way that still allows you to be update-safe so you can benefit from the value of AI and everything else that it unlocks? So that's the next step of the journey, if you will. And then finally, you have to drive enablement and adoption because when a tree falls in the forest, nobody hears about it. So you can do a great ERP implementation. If anybody -- nobody uses it, you're still not going to get the benefit from it. So you need to make sure that you're really driving adoption and value from it. And this is the cycle, if you think about it, and of course then, you need to get the value at the end, is what that at a simplified landscape perspective is that how journey for our customers. Before we can even go talk to them about what you get out of the system and how you can go unlock the data. And this is where, again, if you think about the investments we're making, they're pretty significant. From a business process optimization perspective, we've got one of the best in the industry tool, SAP Signavio, deeply connected that understands our application, you can model your current state. And then not just implementation time, understand where you want to be. But then continuously track even in the use state to say, hey, are you -- is it really working to how you designed it? And I'll speed up a little bit. In understanding the application landscape, that's LeanIX because we want to make sure that, a, you have a full understanding of your current state. And in your future state, you can actually intentionally manage it and monitor it. Because in the world where there's a lot of security threat and privacy threat as well, it's critically important that as an organization you know where your data is, where your processes are running, which applications and so forth. And then with our cloud application life cycle management tool, we actually help provide our customers that guided methodology that says, how should you go through it? And then this is the one that I love because we provide that optionality to say, "Hey, you can still make it your own, but we're going to give you now very visibly a view into whether you're doing it in a way where you're putting your future at risk by doing extensions or customizations that won't allow you to consume the updates as easily and quickly as possible." Now you absolutely cannot do that in public cloud even if you try. In private cloud, you can just by the nature of how private cloud is, which is where this becomes critically important. Because we tell them, "You shouldn't do it this way." And then we guide them and control them, we give them a dashboard and an enterprise architect that tells them what's the best way to go do it. And we then give them multiple options in how they can still make it their own. They can do in line extensions in the application as well because some processes just need to be configured and customized in line with where the users are working. And there's update-safe ways of doing it which we've enabled in the public cloud. It's available in the private cloud as well. And certainly, the ones that just don't need to be in the core ERP will run on BTP as well. And that allows you sort of this, again, update-safe extensibility that still allows you to sort of make your processes your own. And then finally, the thing that Christian talked about, our hummingbird which is going to allow this adoption, to make sure that not just that the customers can figure out how -- the end users can figure out how to go use it. But in this application, you actually get signals back to the management as well from a usage perspective to say, hey, is it really being used or not? And then it's intelligent enough to guide you that, hey, you should really be using this because it can deliver this value. Or if you need to do this, this is the best place for you to go. And finally, of course, with BTP and Datasphere, we're also spending a tremendous amount of energy on the data side. So hopefully this makes sense. This was a simplified version. For those that haven't gone through an ERP implementation, now at least you have a quick textbook crash course of it. But I do want to show you, and we do have a demo for you that we haven't shown at Sapphire today. So you are in for a treat of WalkMe because this is the announcement we made this morning. So if that's okay with you, we'll roll the video, if I remember my slides, right of WalkMe now. [Presentation]

So I think to sort of sum up the benefits of the how part. There's obviously significant benefits, as you can assess, for the customers as well because they can get from that current state to that persistent innovative state in a very hopefully expedient but predictable as well. So time to usage and value, and this is where then they can start leveraging the AI that we're working on. And all the meters around the what sort of starts running up from an SAP perspective to end hopefully value back to our customers. So certainly from a scale and a partner channel capacity perspective, which is a good problem that we're already seeing, it helps outside of even the investments because some of the things that you even didn't have on the slide, which is the SAP consultant the Joule consultant and the Joule; ABAP, Joule, copilot part as well that actually happen to helps throughout that journey as well. But the two big benefits from an SAP perspective, and certainly there's a lot from a customer perspective, is it allows us to sort of get customers to that place where they can start consuming a lot more, start expanding. And then from a channel capacity perspective, it allows them to do more, which is where a lot of the demand is. So moving on to the what. For those, I apologize, that were here yesterday, this is going to sound a little repetitive. But I'm going to sort of give you sort of a different spin on this. There's a lot of talk on AI. Everybody literally is talking about AI, at least from a tech company perspective, if not even in the non-tech space. But there's three things that we believe that you really need to have to make sure that, both from a tech company perspective, but then more so from an end user perspective, that it can realize benefits, either revenue from a tech company perspective or benefits from a customer perspective. And that are these three things. One, you need scenarios or use cases that actually make sense and deliver value, which is thing number one. Which largely most people can come up with. I would still argue, as SAP, we have an edge because we have the so much depth from a business process perspective, and then on top depth from an industry perspective on the 25%-plus that Christian talked about. But let's say, scenarios anybody can come up with. But the next two things are where I think we have a unique differentiation from an AI perspective, which is what separates the hype from what the reality can be and what separates for customers what the potential benefit could be to realize benefit. And that's, can the AI that we're working on seamlessly show up in the tools that users use on a daily basis? Or do they need to go do context-switching to be able to use the tool? Because unless you get adoption and usage of that use case, it doesn't really matter. I would argue the best use case of generative AI in the industry is GitHub copilot. And that's because GitHub is where developers were already operating, it just makes their jobs a lot easier. Of course, it lends itself well from a scenario and a use case perspective. But if you think about it from a business application perspective, we have 300 million users every day working in SAP applications. And the more we embed in-context, effortless AI, it's going to get used and deliver value for the customers. As opposed to something that gets bolted on, on top or you need to context-switch and use and come back. And then the third thing is trustworthy. Can you really rely on the feedback that's coming from the AI to be able to use on your daily basis? And again, this is where, from an SAP perspective, we're unique because the applications that we have, have two unique characteristics. One, they're end-to-end from a business process perspective. And two -- so you get the full view of the process, but two, the data that we have from the thousands of customers we have and the consents we've gotten, Christian talked about more than 20,000 consents that we have, allows us to train this tabular, this foundation model, on business data that in addition to the large language model that's been trained on techs makes the results far more reliable than it would be otherwise if you're just relying on the large language model. So this is where, again, the differentiation come in. And certainly, there's a fourth, which is you need to do it in a way that it keeps the customer data secure, private, and it's free of bias as well. So this goes back to our relevant, reliable, responsible. But hopefully, this gives you sort of the behind the scenes view as to why it being effortless and trustworthy is so important. I'll sort of go through the next few slides a little quickly because I've covered them. Again, the end-to-end process allows us for the AI to look left to right because nothing really works in isolation, right? If you think about the front office, the commitments you're making to the customers, what matters is can you actually deliver on those commitments? And that comes from the back office. And that connection is sort of what we provide. If you think about employee profile in employee 360. You can get whatever is in the HR system, but you need the operational data of how their sales performance is or how their performance is on the shop floor to get that Employee 360 view. And the example continues into supplier 360, it continues into Product 360 and so forth. If you want an Asset 360 from an equipment perspective. And that's why, again, we have the unique ability to provide, with the applications that we have that, again, cut through this broad spectrum now in a way where, again, it's that full suite but in a modular, composable and integrated way, which is what we showed yesterday with our GROW suite with the sales, Concur and the ERP application in the middle, if you will. Which is, again, very hard for anybody else to go do. And then secondly, if you go back and think about the UX improvements that Christian talked about, that 95% of it in the core applications were there. But if you think about Joule as being sort of the next experience layer, then there's a level of consistency that's coming up for our users that's beyond just the look and feel of the screens and the workflow. Because Joule, covering 80% of the most used transactions, is what users are going to use to cut across all of these processes. And then if you think about WalkMe from an enablement perspective, again, there's another layer of abstraction that brings that consistency in adoption and use that's good for the applications and the expansion of it, which is one of the things Christian talked about. But then also from an AI perspective, it drives use like nothing else. And then this is where, if you think about one of the announcements we made yesterday, that what -- this slide, I'll use it as a distraction. Hit the back button once, it works, but it doesn't. But I wouldn't focus on the slide. Is that copilot and Joule integration. And we're doing this in a way because we believe, if you think about, again, super simplifying it, copilot works a lot in unstructured data. Certainly, there's a developer GitHub one. But if you look at the Microsoft Copilot one, it's largely on top of unstructured data. The structured data on the business application side with the hundreds of millions of users we have is what Joule is. This integration doesn't allow Copilot to bypass Joule, it actually works through Joule to make sure that customers actually have the ability to use Joule and invoke it from here, not that copilot can go directly to SAP data. So it's actually a win-win in a way for both Microsoft and for sure SAP, because it allows us to still work and invest in Joule. And that's what we're hearing from our customers now on a daily basis, because they feel like there's going to be these 2 copilots, 1 for the business applications world and 1 here that comes together. But there needs to be a seamlessness, again, to drive adoption. And of course, if the things that we ship aren't enough from an AI perspective, Christian touched on it already so I won't spend a lot of time. We have the Business Technology Platform that, besides extensibility, besides integration, allows you with the Gen AI, help to be able to sort of build custom scenarios and surface them into your application, too. We've touched a bit on the data. So again, I won't drain this slide, but we have tons and tons of customers. 99 of the 100 largest customers run SAP. You heard 3 or 4 of them yesterday publicly, as Microsoft, you heard Amazon, you heard NVIDIA, Google, is running SAP and so forth. Across a significant number of industries, the number of users are pretty significant. This gives us two rights, if you will, that are very differentiated for SAP. One is the data that it generates for us to be able to train that unique model that, in augmentation with the large language model, delivers something that's really unique, which is what the teams are working on. And two, the surface area where those hundreds of millions of users are working to make sure, as we make them available in context there, our customers can benefit. And of course then in turn, it delivers results back to SAP as well. And this slide is more inside-looking. And this is my -- 1 of my last 2 slides. This is kind of how we're using AI to get better as SAP. Because it's 1 thing to sort of go preach outside, but are we practicing internally or not? And this sort of goes through that from our go-to-market perspective, our development perspective, as well as just as a sandbox for our people to go try what are the capabilities that we're making available for our employees? But then I'll summarize with this slide. Christian touched on it a little bit. But this is more of our -- I frame this as an internal principal-setting slide, if you will. And I like this because it reminds me of what Satya did when he took over from Ballmer and said cloud first, mobile first. Because I think fundamentally, from a Microsoft employee perspective, which is what I was at the time, it gives a very clear indication to what is important for the company and why. And for us right now for SAP, it is AI first. AI first more from the ability to go light up the scenarios for our customers in the applications, and you've seen tons of examples of that and the differentiation as to why we are the, I believe, one of the only ones that can do it in a way that can get the right adoption and hence the value back to our customers, and value to SAP, and on top of the data that's unique to us. But then also AI first in the way of how we work, which is what the previous slide was with GitHub copilot, how are we accelerating the go-to-market customer service and support functions. But then it's also suite first because our differentiation lies in the fact that you can do the end-to-end cloud. ERP suite is a thing that used to exist before the market sort of started splintering it into, hey, there's an HCM evaluation separately, a CX evaluation separately, and something else evaluation separately, which is still there. But when it comes together, out of the box integrated, the value of it lights up as opposed to the CIO being a Chief Integration Officer as opposed to being a Chief Information Officer. Because when you get to this persistent innovative state where there's disruption hitting you every day, you need to be able to react in a way that a change in the front office can reflect and understand what's happening in the back office. So our ability to sort of do the suite first thing in a composable manner with the right experience that cuts across it, I think is super differentiated. So with this, I'll stop here, and I'll hand it over to Scott, who's going to walk you through how this lands with our customers.

Thank you, Muhammad. Great Job. Good afternoon, everybody. I hope you're having a great Sapphire. Well, I guess it's the simplicity of go to market. So I've only got 4 slides. But then again, I'm not an engineer, so I'm not building great products. My job is to take the great innovation that SAP builds, the strategy that SAP has and manifested into a go to market that you can materially rely upon when you look at the financial performance of SAP. So I'm going to talk about what we see in real pipeline, what's happening in the market, what a customer is saying, doing and what that is. Secondly, I'm going to talk about revenue growth, what that revenue growth and what's fueling that revenue growth. Third, I'm going to talk about the adoption and consumption, and I'm going to build on what Christian and Muhammad spoke about not only of WalkMe but of the transformation portfolio and how that drives the adoption and consumption at our customer base. And last but not least, and I'm sure you're very interested to hear this, is how we're driving profitable revenue growth. What are the levers that we're doing on a go-to-market side so that as we grow our revenue, obviously we're doing so in nonlinear ways, and the cost doesn't grow at the same time. So let me, first of all, cover the go to market. The reality is we see many companies in the SaaS space having difficulty in demand because, on one hand, in the first half of 2023, what we did see was many companies were figuring out with AI what did that mean. Where do I need to spend the money? So you had one friend where you said, well, AI, we understand. We're trying to learn. We need to see that. But on the other side, they were still increasing their spend. IT budget continues to grow. CIOs are getting access to a higher set of funds to support the growth of their enterprise. But they wanted to understand how. And in SAP, there are 4 main drivers that I just want to re-highlight that's facilitating our growth because what you can see behind me is that, in the second half, normally, we see first half to second half, you normally see a 1.5x to 2x increase in pipeline. We're always building, so we innovate. We build at the beginning, and then in the second half, it increases. But in 2022, it was about a 1.6x. At the second half of last year, we saw an incredible acceleration of the pipeline. And if I was to then represent the first half of 2024, it got even faster. So what are the things that are driving that? Well, number one, our portfolio, everything that Christian and Muhammad described, is manifesting it in a buying behavior in the market that customers are reducing the amount -- sorry, I thought I clicked it -- reducing the amount of applications that they've got in their landscape. They're reducing the number of vendors, and they're looking to consolidate that portfolio. In your words or in our words, that's called cross-sell and upsell. But in their terms, they're reducing the complexity of the number of companies that they deal with and the applications in their landscape, and we're making it easier. We're making it easier for them to do that. They're no longer thinking, oh, I need to look at SuccessFactors versus their competitor or Ariba versus their competitor or our Sales Cloud versus -- they're looking at the portfolio of capabilities. The second is the transformation platform that everything that we described, data, process, systems and people now with WalkMe, is able to help them transform faster than ever. And I want to come back to that because I want to highlight how important that is when we go to market. It is not enough for companies to observe and look at business applications and say that is potential opportunity. They need a journey. They need a partner to help them get there. That is driving pipeline growth. The third, and I would argue, the most critical is we have got the best customer base on the planet. We have got the best customer base that has leveraged and used why we have so many customers here, why they come in online, is because they look to SAP to be their partner, and you know that we've got a significant amount. And I'll talk to what on the revenue side that our existing customers moving from a maintenance base -- sorry, it is here. Let me go back one. Accidentally went forward -- so moving from the maintenance base through to our cloud revenue. And then last but not least is AI has been fueling. And AI is not just about solutions. What the customers are now saying to us from a go to market is this. It is -- AI on the platform is interesting. It's useful. They'll run proof of concepts. They'll run pilots. But when it's embedded into their daily task, when it's embedded into their business use, it's embedded into their processes, then I can extract value. And the only way that they're able to do that is through business applications because we're the ones who deliver that capability. And so funnily enough, even though AI has -- we've got a lot of build-out that we're doing that Muhammad and then Philip and the team are doing. When they sign up with us, they're signing up 3-, 5-, 6-, 7-year agreements. So the potential of innovation knowing of our commitment to that value, even though they don't know exactly what all those use cases are, but the opportunity to be on the innovation road map is critical because if they don't move to the cloud with SAP, they lose the window -- they lose that opportunity. They're stuck in an on-premise environment where they're not going to be able to extract that value. Net of all of this is that we are seeing significant pipeline growth. So when Christian represents our financial outlook and our confidence in that, it's backed up by data that is underpinned by customer sentiment that we can bank on. Now the second part of -- from a go to market is our revenue and our cloud momentum. And every year that I have done this for, I think, 4 years now, we've talked about the move of our installed base customers and we've moved to the cloud. And you can see that our growth in RISE, our cloud ERP suite, has been tremendous. Be assured that the continued momentum on GROW with SAP and RISE with SAP has been a great part of our move. And that's why when you see there our maintenance revenue converted to cloud bookings, a lot of that is our historical installed base customers that are currently spending on maintenance, but they go -- and then they go into the cloud. But here's the part that excites us even more, is that not only are they moving to the cloud with our ERP faster, but they're also buying more solutions than they've done ever before. So Christian mentioned the increase of more than 4 solutions. Our portfolio strategy, the ease of adoption is enabling customers, so we're getting better cross-sell. We're getting better upsell. So a higher proportion of customers that are moving to cloud ERP are buying 4 or more solutions. Deal sizes are increasing by up to 50%, deal sizes. Now that's just not on the size of the contract from a duration. That's on the number of solutions. So we're up to 1,000 that has 4 and more solutions. That trend will continue to rise. And the other thing that I would say is our go-to-market motions will match that. Now the one thing about revenue growth, when you're a cloud company is you cannot bank on the fact that the subscription revenue will continue to come. You've got to be obsessed about adoption, and adoption has many levers to it. We talked about -- and Muhammad did a great job talking about WalkMe and what the potential that brings in terms of user adoption. But to get user adoption, you've got to get deployment first. They've got to go live. They've got to use the technology because, as I tell my team every single day, bookings are simply an opportunity to create value. The only way value is truly generated is when it's deployed, it's used, it's consumed. And then that gives us the right to expand both on a cross-sell and on an upsell. And so funnily enough, our focus on deployments, deployed ACV and we're driving, we've been managing our organization, both on the services and our partner ecosystem about the deployment speed time to value, the deployment -- the outcomes, the business return that they're getting on it, so we're actually increasing our deployments faster than what you're seeing on the revenue. What can you take from that? You can take that as customers have acquired our technology on bookings and that's leading into revenue, the deployment speed is getting faster and faster. We look at ways that we can have faster activation of our contracts. I haven't met a customer yet who said, "Look, my ramp of what I expect to use looks like this. But if I can go faster and if I can get quicker time to value, I'll do it." They're not saying slow down. All they want to make sure is it gets easier to use and consume that. We've got the ability in that persistent state of innovation that Muhammad talked about that the time between when you procure and then you use is getting shorter and shorter and shorter. So whilst your initial big ERP transformation might be a significant journey, your ongoing iterations become really rapid. And the last one that I wanted to highlight here because I know we don't have a huge amount of time is the partner incentivization. Our partners between 2021 and 2023, our indirect growth was at 100%. So our partner ecosystem driving revenue growth and bookings growth for SAP doubled in that period, growing way faster than on the direct. I know SAP, everyone thinks SAP. We've got a big direct sales team. And yes, we do. We have a great relationship with our largest customers. But interestingly is when we looked at our growth in the broader ecosystem, their ability to be able to drive both bookings but also faster adoption and project delivery and doing so at scale has led to an increase in revenue much faster than the broader SAP. So GROW with SAP fundamentally is underpinned by our partner ecosystem's ability to do repeatable, fast projects again and again and again and again and again. And then when we add in SuccessFactors and Concur and Sales Cloud around that capability, all we're able to do is we're able to get the cross-sell in the mid-market segment, and we're able to do it at scale. Clearly, on the adoption side to reiterate on the user adoption, I am obviously super excited about what WalkMe can bring because the team that I'm responsible for, the CSMs, the people who come in and help customers on user adoption journeys in combination to what Thomas' team is doing on the technical adoption, we're able to complement the different parts of an enterprise on that deployment adoption value journey. And last but not least is on revenue excellence. And this is probably the question I get the most other than are we growing fast enough, is are we growing profitably. I mentioned at the beginning that the market is -- from a SaaS point of view, you've seen mixed performance out there. But at SAP, we've been growing our net retention rate from the beginning of '22 to the end of '24 at 6 percentage points. So the rest of the market was actually declining in retention rates, and we are increasing. Why is that? Well, back to all the things that I've described before, but customers are looking to fewer vendors. Our upselling and cross-selling efforts has been a huge emphasis of our team. And I made the statement last year that we are trying to drive our growth of SAP without trying to increase our sales and marketing as a percentage of revenue. In fact, quite the opposite, we're trying to reduce that. And the only way we're able to do it is get more efficiency. So how? Well, we're increasing. We're holding the profitability of our business. The demand is strong. Our value proposition is strong. Our transformation capability enables and so the buying -- the pricing power that we have and holding on to that is exceptionally strong. So we have got an increase. As customers are buying more on an upsell and cross-sell, we're increasing the profitable revenue for SAP. Secondly, we have changed some of our policies around payout about -- we've had more partner-driven or what I call partner autonomous territories, territories that are only operated by the partner. And the SAP team doesn't need to engage there because the partners can run those territories, do so at scale. Our cost to serve from a go to market is obviously way lower. We've been investing in the digital modalities, so teams that can provide a capability that scales around the world, so whether it be renewal centers, because we do tens of thousands of renewals every quarter, when we're doing so, we don't want to do that with customer-facing teams, digital center and able to automate that again and again. And then last but not least is our own internal adoption of AI whether it be in terms of analysis of customers that are ready to move to the cloud or customers that are on their consumption ratios and how they can drive more usage, so getting more intelligent in how we go to market than ever before. The net of all of this is our pipeline, our revenue growth, our transformation capability to drive adoption and consumption and ultimately, our ability to do it profitably gives us confidence that as we map forward together with the product strategy that's been described, that we are able to sustain and propel way beyond what we've predicted for 2025 but 2027 and beyond, where an organization will continue to be relevant for our customers well into the future. But if you didn't believe me, well, like I try to do every year, have a listen to one of our customers. So I was -- you saw on stage that, Christian mentioned it, I did as well in different forums, that Vodafone, one of our great customers, global customers has been -- chosen SAP on the transformation journey. And to join us on stage, Holger Grewe, who leads transformation for Vodafone. Welcome, Holger.

Thanks, Scott.

Hey, Holger. All right. I've set you up really well. The business transformation agenda, you've obviously been on this journey for a while, Holger. What is Vodafone trying to do?

Now, of course, we try to maximize the value out of cloud and AI. But at the same time, this needs to support the overall business strategy. So we have 3 pillars. One is the customer. Then we want to drive simplicity, and we want to grow. To achieve that, we are rightsizing our European operations, focusing on the most profitable markets. We want to continue the great growth journey that we have in Africa. A lot more focus on the B2B sector and then kind of bundling up all our investments where we have either a joint venture or less, and that requires also a modular approach.

So Holger, you and I have spoken a lot. I obviously have the fun of being the sponsor of the relationship with Vodafone for a number of years now. You made a decision to choose not only RISE with SAP, but a number of other technologies. Why choose RISE? What was the proposition that SAP was bringing? And why -- what led you to bring -- make that decision?

I mentioned the modular thing, right? So at the moment, I mean, we have been on a great journey together since 2006, 2007, right, and had made huge inroads. But now with the changing shape of Vodafone, we also need to be more flexible, right? And clearly, cloud and RISE is enabling more flexibility. Plus from an approach, it is value driven. And that is what we like. So in Vodafone and SAP, transformation is always creating business value, so we are not doing IT projects.

And you're using not only RISE, but Signavio, Datasphere, Analytics Cloud. You're using other capabilities. Why choose those versus other potential best of breeds?

And that is how it works together, right? I think it's the power of data and how the different modules speak to each other. So this is absolutely key for us.

Yes. As Muhammad said, the modular ERP, the integrated portfolio, obviously, is a key part. No business does what you're doing and going through the transformation without benefits being an expectation and usually in a really strong and, I know in your case, a really clearly articulated business case. Can you summarize the benefits that Vodafone are expecting as a result of going on this journey with SAP?

Yes. So as I mentioned before, so we are not only moving systems into the cloud. So we are actually creating new platforms, which will supplement things that we already have. And we are focusing on 2 areas. One is the accounts receivable and collection side, which is still very local in our footprint. And the other thing is the logistics of our mobile handsets, largely that we resell to our customers, also areas that are very local still and hosted in the local markets. So we will kind of standardize this, move it to sub RISE, and we will then see the scale benefits, a lot better transparency on the working capital. And I think this is the biggest business lever. Of course, we also expect TCO reduction. And frankly, if we are able to enable lots of AI, there will be also simple cost reductions.

Can I come back to that? But be on the AI side in a moment. But one of the things that was interesting when we had the conversation and where we're going through this journey is the TCO, and I guess, it's probably a message for this community, is TCO is really important. Our CIOs really care about TCO. But business value and business change and the transformation that when they go on these journeys with SAP, the biggest part of their benefits case is the enabling value that's created. If you now add AI in, what are the expectations that you have? Because I know you've chosen to go with us on the journey. But how do you see RISE and SAP supporting the journey with AI?

So we have -- we are -- part of our overall strategy is also shared operations, and we have huge shared service centers already in combination now with a common data set that we actually get from SAP and from RISE. This is kind of AI or benefits on steroids, right, because you meet -- you merge 2 things, and the results should be very good.

I could be up here, but I see the time it says that I need to finish, but Holger, can I just say that the reference case of the Vodafone journey, I know you've got significant business transformation. The opportunity for SAP to have the enabling technology to support that as you serve your customers better, we are incredibly proud and grateful and look forward to future and maybe some updates to this audience in the future.

Super. Thank you. Bye-bye.

Thank you. Thank you. So I hope that helped in giving a bit of a summary of, in customers' terms, everything that I described and why the choice of SAP is a stronger one, a better one than it's ever been before. But now to talk a little bit more on the how, the commercialization, what are our strategies to support that go to market, I'm going to hand over to my wonderful colleague, Julia White.

Thanks so much. All right. There's not that many rooms you want to listen to our commercial model, so I'm always delighted when people want to talk about this topic. So I'm going to walk through how we're updating and adjusting our overall monetization strategy really to support and further and hopefully, accelerate our strategy. So starting, of course, with our portfolio strategy, which you heard from Muhammad obviously from a product perspective and Christian and very much the idea of land and expand, right? So I'm going to actually walk through the entire approach in the fundamental land-and-expand strategy and how we're trying to use our business model to further that piece of it. All right. Okay. So I think someone else [indiscernible]. Perfect. All right. So starting with the land strategy. Basically, we have 2 fundamental ways we think about landing that first opportunity with our customer and how we build packages and pricing around that. The first one for the core cloud ERP, of course, is RISE With SAP and our package is there. And each one of these, by the way, I'll go deeper into, so this is at a high level. So the first one, RISE and package optimization we're doing there; and then, of course, GROW, that's much more targeted towards net new, kind of mid-market, upper or lower enterprise, whereas RISE really optimized for that installed base and how do we appeal and provide the right package for them. And then the second piece is embedding and kind of seeding both BTP as well as our AI capabilities, and then from there, drive the upsell. So then the expand motion, if those are kind of 2 kind of land motions to take that to the next step and drive that cross-sell, in some case, upsell, we're now adding new buying packages for different audiences and can just make it simpler and easier for them to kind of have a coherent package for an audience or a buying committee as we talk about it internally. And then from the platform and the AI perspective, essentially making it -- so as they start using and adopting, it's easy to consume more, add on more and add more advanced capabilities there as well. So core packages for RISE and GROW and then buying center packages to expand, embedded platform capabilities and then easy ways to continue to consume more of them or go to more advanced services, so that's the basic principles of how we're doing our packaging and pricing in each one of those. So into the more detailed aspect of it. So starting with RISE, again, really targeted, primarily really optimized at our installed base, looking at larger organizations and how do we move them into the cloud. So we have 2 packages today in market. We have our RISE Premium and RISE Premium Plus. From a Premium perspective, we have obviously S/4HANA Cloud Private Edition. And then in there with that is kind of the logical capabilities around extensions, automation, other things they would need to work on clean core and move to that model. And then as we move into the Premium Plus package, which is a newer one, and that has where we add more advanced finance capabilities, data analytics, but it's also where we've put our sustainability and our AI capabilities. So it's really in that package where we're offering them. And what we look at is essentially that anything in these 2 kind of core packages, it has to be broadly applicable to the vast majority of our customers, right? We're not going to put things in here that are only applicable to 10% or 20% of our customers. It just doesn't make sense. We're just going to have shelfware. So this is where we think broadly -- broad use cases, broadly applicable. Most people are going to want these things. And when they bring them together like this, too, we also give them incentive. So the discount on these packages are between 20% and 40% versus buying each of those individual capabilities stand-alone, right? So if they're going to say, hey, I'm going to use 80% of these, I'm better off just buying the package and getting the coherent group of them that are broadly applicable for those organizations. The RISE Premium has been in the market for many years. Premium Plus, we added not quite even a year ago, but we're starting to get traction. Obviously, larger -- longer sales cycles on these but we're starting to see, particularly around sustainability and AI, driving more interest in that package particularly. So that's the land piece of it. Then we go into our expand motion. So what we're doing here is essentially looking across our very vast portfolio and for many, many, many years, we've mostly been just been selling lots of things stand-alone. So instead of that, which is a complicated thing for our sales and our customers to understand, bringing them together, again, in coherent packages targeted at a buying committee around a specific use case. Now these are things that necessarily -- aren't necessarily going to be applicable to 80% of the customers. They're going to be applicable to specific parts of the organization and specific use cases. But it makes it more coherent and clearer, both what we have as well as what use case it can be applied against. And so what we've started with so far is finance packages, where we're bundling it against different use cases in finance, digital banking, treasury risk management as examples and then also supply chain. We have a lot of capabilities and so packaging it into kind of 5 areas of use cases. So now both whether it's our customers trying to understand what to buy or our sales or partners trying to pitch it, they have clear opportunities to say, "Oh, this is the use case. Here's the package for you." And similar approach in terms of giving kind of a discount as a package versus buying each of these things stand-alone, between 20% and 40% discount over stand-alone buying. And this is the beginning, and we're getting started and of course, doing research and working with our customers on these. But you should expect to see us continue to build them out for further around like procurement, HR, other places where our portfolio runs to, again, make it simpler and clearer of how to start with the core and then expand based on those use cases. So that's RISE. Into GROW, similar also. So our land motion, we have GROW base, GROW Premium. And again, this is -- GROW is more targeted to that lower enterprise, upper mid-market space. And so the packaging here is a little bit different. It's got a little bit more of a sweet flavor to it, right, so a little bit broader capabilities in these core packages but more simple capabilities, right, out of the box, as Muhammad talked about in kind of giving that mini suite. So in the base case, we actually even in there have some kind of simple procurement, automation, some of those capabilities in that base case as well as in our premium offering where we have more of our advanced finance and other planning capabilities. And what we announced, I guess, yesterday, is in our premium offering, that's where we'll be adding in our Sales Cloud capability as well as Expense Concur capabilities. So now that premium package is starting to give them that beginning broader suite, right, in a single coherent package and Muhammad creating that out-of-the-box experience for them. So as we -- again, as we went and talk to these customers and they had bought GROW, a lot of them had bought Concur Expense with it. So like why don't we just make that easier? And then the other top issue they had is like a sales management, getting that going, maturing what they do from a sales pipeline management. So that led us to bring in these pieces together. And again -- and now in this segment, we actually have a little bit -- more price advantageous to buy that premium suite versus buy them all stand-alone. So for GROW, the discount of the packages is between actually 30% and 70%. So real cost price benefit for them to choose the package over trying to buy individual pieces. And this segment tends to do more package buying anyway. They don't have the super sophisticated buyers who want to slice and dice everything. So that's the core packages, again, same principle, more things that are more broadly useful to the whole organization. And then we've introduced the beginning of, again, buying committee packages. And this one, we've brought finance forward and then HR, again, because it's targeted a little bit different segment, different use cases. We've oriented our first packages around things where we see, okay, there's some use cases for advanced finance, but I think HR is actually going to be one that we see probably pick up the most because that core capability of HR, kind of that next logical step as the company matures and grows and move to more sophisticated packages. So -- but from a theory perspective and approach similar, land with those core packages and then expand and do the cross-sell with buying packages and buying [ centers ]. So that's the application level of it. From a platform perspective, similar land and expand but of course, platform services are a little different. So what we do here is effectively embed some of our core business technology platform services into our applications for -- in some cases, just because it creates consistency across that -- in the suite, that suite experience, things like authentication services or integration services and then adding additional kind of platform services that make sense for that use case. So for an example, I talked about RISE and GROW. You saw in there things like Datasphere for data and analytics capabilities. So that makes sense in that package. First SuccessFactors, some of our core analytics capability to do workforce planning. That's embedded in that offering. And then in the case of sales and services, you have kind of the SAP build, our no-code low-code capability and automation capability for those workloads. So those are part of those line of business solutions or those packages with those platform services just part of them. And then when the customer deploys them, starts using the analytics for HR and using workforce analytics and they want to expand into maybe cross analytics. They can get upsold and buy more, either -- or Analytics Cloud or more capacity of what they've been using and kind of cross from there. Similar for the rest of the capabilities. So they can get started, get used to them, build them out and they say, "Hey, I want to use it across my organization. I just want to use more of it within that application." And to do that, it makes it very easy to buy through a consumptive-based model, our platform services, so they can do it on a pay-as-you-go or on kind of our upfront approach with our BTPEA, or enterprise agreement for the platform services. They can buy either way on that front, pretty consistent from a platform business model perspective. But again, seeding it, what advantages we have as being an application and a platform company, is we can put the platform in the applications and then drive upsell and consumption from there. So on AI, which I know is always a hot topic, I'm going to first start with just explaining our AI unit because it's a bit new, and then I'll talk about how we do the land-and-expand motion there. So for AI, as you've heard from us hopefully already, we are using a whole range of different large language models and kind of infrastructure and AI infrastructure providers. And we wanted a way to basically abstract that cost from our customers. So we don't want them to have to think about that. We just want to be able to provide the AI capabilities on top of it. So what we've done essentially is create a single unit called an AI unit, and it gives us the ability to be flexible in the value of the AI unit in a use case and give us complete abstraction from whatever the large language model underneath we might be using. So for powering a spend management or spend control tower, we can kind of move around different LLMs. We cannot price optimize where we have an AI unit that's consistent for our customers. And the principles, again, we had for this are, one, simple. We can't have different ones for every time. And if we're going to change different models, we don't want to have to change the business model. It also has to work across portfolio. So we've created an AI unit that works across all parts of it, just not different ones for different applications; and then flexibility across a whole wide range of use cases. You -- maybe, yesterday, you heard Christian talk about 100 use cases coming by the end of the year. We didn't need 100 different monetization models. That would be complete no starter with our customers. So that's the way we've done it. Basically, AI unit can be created to be applied to any use case and the different value it's given depends on the use case. But it gives us an abstraction on that one. And the last aspect of AI units is they can be pooled. So maybe I bought RISE Premium Plus and it has AI units in it. I can actually use them with SuccessFactors if I want. It's a pooled resource. We are creating controls for the IT team to be able to assign them so that they are allocated to a certain workload, but from our perspective, they can pool them. So that's the way we've created the monetization. Now how we've embedded them, very consistent with what we do from a platform service because they fundamentally work like a platform service. So essentially, we're embedding them into our different offerings. You saw them in RISE Premium Plus in that package there. You also see them in kind of 3 different ways in our offerings. First, it's embedded into the existing subscription, no additional cost. They're just now part of it, right? An example of that is a category management. There's new AI capabilities in category management. The AI units are just buried in that subscription. Just the customer keeps using it. They just get rights to them, and that allows them to use that -- light up that use case and not have to change anything about their subscription. The second one is adding them in a more expensive package. So that's what we're doing with RISE Premium Plus. So we're putting them in there, but we're adding up price around there as well because there's new value being created. We want to have a fair exchange with the customer. We create more value. We get to charge more. So that's in the case of like a RISE Premium Plus. And then the third way we do it is just fundamentally an add-on. So in the CX case, from a technology perspective, they've built a stand-alone CX AI toolkit that works with sales and services, so customers can buy that. And as part of that comes the AI unit monetization in that offering. So kind of 3 different ways. And this is obviously a rapidly evolving space, so we'll see if we need other models but trying to keep it simple, right? We can kill ourselves with licensing and pricing complexity. We know. We've been in this business a long time, so trying to avoid that plight while still having a lot of flexibility around the different kinds of AI use cases that we're building and delivering and value extraction and 2-way extraction with the customers. So there, get started. And then from there, again, as they use more, as they consume more, they can buy more. And again, in this case, the AI units are more equivalent to our BTP. So we actually can buy them as pay as you go or you can buy them as part of your BTPEA, right? So they're more of a -- they work in the same way as a consumption service. So they're on that business model on that side of it. So -- and that's for the kind of preconfigured AI capabilities. Now we also talked a lot yesterday and today about custom AI and ability to build on our platform custom use cases. And we expect to see a lot of our RISE customers doing this, a lot of our partners doing this for our RISE customers. So for the AI capabilities, the custom AI capabilities, that's built from a technology perspective on our AI core that's on the BTP, right? We're opening up the generative AI hub functionality that gives them that, basically, developer toolkit running on top of all those large language models to build whatever AI solution they want. So in this case, again, just trying to keep it simple. The business model for this will be just the same as BTP. It's fundamentally a BTP service, so customers can use it and get it through BTP pay-as-you-go license model or on a BTPEA kind of upfront payment approach -- packaging payment approach. So that's what we do from the custom side; and again, not too inconsistent with the AI units but a little bit different from the prebuild experiences that have AI units and a certain amount to them versus just a pure consumption, more of a developer-oriented platform service approach. So that's that piece of it. So everyone got their lessons on pricing and licensing from us. All right. I think that's all I have for you today. So I think I hand it over to Dominik now.

Thank you, Julia. So good afternoon also from my side. It's great to have you here on site, and also hi to all those that are following us virtually on our web live. So the good news is there is actually no news. If you look at this chart here, those numbers will look very familiar to you. And actually, to be honest, not so much has happened since last time we met a year ago in terms of what we said about what numbers will be there. There's just one very, very notable exception, which is, since summer of last year, last year, we have been jointly feverishly working on a transformation program for our company, which we then announced will add EUR 0.5 billion of profit and free cash flow to our results. And message on that front is that we are making really good progress. You've heard post Q1 that the acceptance rates on our voluntary programs in the U.S. have been quite high. They actually exceeded our expectations. We've just wrapped up the registration process in Germany, and I can today say that our confidence level that we will achieve these 8,000 reductions that we have earmarked is very high. Actually, there might be a certain overshoot, but let's not skin the bear before we've killed it because there is a voluntary component in that program. There will be a final consent needed from employees by end of the third quarter; and for sure, we will know only in October. So bear with us for that. If there are more opportunities to fine-tune and transform, we will grab them but only if there is a good business case, a good present value out of these. In terms of the visibility that we have by now on reaching our Ambition 2025, I think we are making also gradual progress. You have seen our current cloud backlog accelerate to 27% by end of last year. End of Q1, we were at 28%. And if you look at the trajectory of the cloud revenues, you actually see that kind of trajectory. And here, you see the midpoint of the outlook in 2024 and then the ambition for 2025 is actually quite manageable, intact. If you think about how you translate the CCB into cloud revenues, you take the haircuts for the transaction business, which we've guided to be flattish in 2024. It actually nicely triangulates. There should not be much surprise. Where we have a little bit of a J curve is on the operating profit. You see that there is a kind of back-end loaded inflection to the ambition 2025, but that's very, very natural. I just announced the timing of our restructuring program. So the lion's share of the benefits will actually be available to us in 2025. We're just implementing -- starting to implement people, leaving the company. We are also rehiring on the other side. But net-net, there will be a significant cost reduction, so we'll see the full benefit of that in 2025. Free cash flow, most back-end loaded. I can say, it's the real J curve, is obviously the big investment we do in the restructuring. We announced post Q1 that we will currently accrue at least EUR 2.2 billion. This is what we know already is kind of what we really need. And I mentioned the discussion about further opportunities we might materialize. There are also, I'd say, adjustments, cleanup measures from the past. We discontinued that kind of SAP-induced factoring program, a couple of hundred million. There are some compliance payments we've already made actually in Q1, a couple of hundred million. And there was the last time a really big slough of stock-based compensation, cash settled, which, thanks to share price increasing by EUR 41 in 1 quarter, gave us a little bit of a headwind on the cash also for this year. But obviously, with the transition to more equity settled, that will be out of the equation. So if you do the walk from this EUR 3.5 billion, you add these items on top. And then you think about the pickup on the operating profit and how much of that should fall through to free cash flow, plus the change in the model on the stock-based compensation, you have actually acquired a reasonable walk into free cash flow 2025. So that chart is actually quite uneventful, I would hope. And it also put us on a trajectory to grow with a CAGR of 10% from 2023 to the Ambition 2025. Here we go. Now the question is what's happening beyond. I think that's really what we get a lot of inquiries about. Now can you tell us more what will happen beyond? And those of you who know me, you know that I'm kind of a very analytical person, very mathematical by nature, engineer by training. And I just know that the further you move out, the broader the error margin gets on statistics. And for me, guidance is a commitment. And just by design, if you move out further in time, the error margin increases. If you want to have the same confidence level, which is, of course, higher than 50% -- because if I would communicate an expectation value, I would miss it in 50% of the cases, and I'm sure none of you would be happy about that. It would mean I would take more and more haircuts. So I'm always reluctant to play that game. But of course, you want to know what are our orientations to drive our performance beyond the year 2025. First one is, of course, on smart definition. And forgive me for that simplification here. There's one nice proverb I learned from a boss of mine, and I actually learned that, that was coming from a French writer and philosopher. That's Paul Valery, who said what is simple is wrong, but what is complicated cannot be understood. So forgive me if I'm really simple here. And one simple way to benchmark us with others is just to look at our growth and look at how much of that revenue is falling down to free cash flow. It's the famous Rule of 40. And funnily, those of you who do the benchmarking will see that, as of today, most people look at kind of 12 months forward horizon. We are in that ballpark in our competitive landscape, and our competitors trade at that level. I see a lot of discussions about that simplification because people say what's the real value of growth versus the real value of margin and cash conversion. And there's always an argument, yes. Actually, mathematically, as a partial derivative, growth is more valuable than margin, but I'm a little bit careful there because, normally, if you start dialing up the growth, there's also a kind of penalty on the margin. So it's not a partial derivative. They're correlated. So I like that kind of equal weighting of the 2. And our current goal is to really drive both the growth and the margin and cash conversion up also beyond 2025. And that was also one key goal of our transformation program, to not only make a kind of catch-up move from '23 to '25 in terms of competitive benchmarking but also decouple the total expenses more from the revenue line. Actually, in the past, it was the other way around. So we jumped off at about 25% if you add the growth and the free cash flow margin in 2023. If I look at that kind of Rule of 40 as a benchmark, we think we will cover a good half of the way through 2025, and then it will be more gradually grinding up to come closer. And let's really see how we can do that. And before I go into that chart, I want to make one big caveat on the famous Rule of 40. I want to keep it simple, but there's one thing I cannot simplify, which is stock-based compensation is important. You know that we made a clear statement by embarking stock-based compensation or operating profit. We take it very seriously. And of course, you can pound your chest and say I have a super Rule of 40 performance if you issue a high-teens percent of revenues and stock-based compensation. If, in the end, you have to repurchase all these shares, it's a challenge. So I think that's the one thing that you should kind of take into account when do this benchmarking, what is really equity-settled stock-based compensation. We still have also some smaller part going forward in cash-settled compensation. That's already fully deducted in free cash flow. But our equity-settled stock-based compensation as a percent of revenues, which is just kind of dipping into your pockets with dilution as shareholders, that is kind of below mid-single digit in 2025 for SAP, and it's, in some other cases, much higher than that. Now I like this kind of Sankey chart, it's called. It's an idea Investor Relations had. Thank you for that. And I love it a lot because it makes it so nicely visible what really matters. You see a lot of small things, but you see some really big things. And what you see is that there is a big kind of revenue stream feeding the free cash flow, which is then coming out at the very right. And by the way, this whole concept has been developed around the energy in the steam machine by an engineer called Sankey, Irish engineer. And you see that, actually, there are 2 major blocks on the revenue side that really do the lion's share of the performance. So you have to get the assumptions on these 2 rights. The other ones, well, you can be off a little bit here and there, but it's also more granular. It won't move the needle as much. And it's the cloud ERP suite within the cloud revenues, and it's actually the support. And you all know that, we just discussed that, to some degree, they're correlated. There's almost like a hedge between them because of the conversion we have in these. And yes, the key notion I want to share with you is a trivial one, which is really the mix effect we're going to see over the next years because, today, this EUR 13.7 billion cloud revenues in 2023, representing 44% of revenues, they will shoot up massively because they're growing much faster. And the EUR 13.3 billion software, support and services will continue to decline. And the question is now how can we come up with a reasonable model about how much that will be. And in order to do that properly, we did a lot of analysis to think about what's the best way to slice and dice it to, again, keep it, on the one hand, simple but a model that is also very meaningful. And we came up with this logic that was also referred to in the prior speeches that is there's actually, to do the simple part first, an Infrastructure-as-a-Service business, which we are deemphasizing. It's capital intensive. There is a lot of hyperscalers out there, who have very deep pockets. It's not where we want to play. To the contrary, we really want to play the competition of the hyperscalers and use our converged cloud for special cases, so to speak. And then there's the SaaS and the PaaS offering, where we came up with a certain segmentation, one being cloud ERP suite, and we try to kind of graphically show that on our rising sun chart here, that it's really 100% basically of spend management and business network and supply chain management, the entire S4, the entire BTP, the entire transformation suite. But there are some parts of human capital management and customer relationship management, which are outside, which is called the Extension Suite. The logic there is, really, there is kind of a gearbox. I would call it the nervous system of a company where transactions are really all linked together. They cross sell well, as Scott has explained, as Julia has explained. We even commercially bundle them. And there are some other applications, which are a little bit further out where the discretion of the customer is a little bit higher because they don't kind of so tightly couple to this machine. And for me personally, the best surprise or joy I had at SAP so far was first time looking after having segmented that way and really with a very sound logic to look at the steadiness of that kind of engine running since now 9 quarters in a row at 30% plus. And the other part of it, the extension suite is actually not enjoying the same growth rate. Frankly, the competition is higher. If you think about where this kind of synergy is playing, how much R&D money we invest in that business, what competitors are out there, yes, we clearly win market share in Cloud ERP suite, but we are in a high single-digit growth area with Extension Suite. Of course, we're currently feverishly working on resuscitating the growth. There was a dip because of the divestiture of Litmos. So if you depollute for that, I think the kind of high single digit you see here in Q1 is a reasonable assumption, conservative assumption, what could happen. And [ just ] already mentioned deemphasized. Now if you think about our guidance for cloud revenues for 2024 and the ambition for 2025, you can actually derive that in a very simple way. You take the Q1 growth rates, 32% Cloud ERP suite; Extension Suite, 8%; and infrastructure service, and you apply on the revenue base of 2023 of these components for 2 years in a row these growth rates and you will see it's exactly the same. So we are taking a ruler. And the reason why we feel comfortable about that is that we already see kind of the CCB coming, the pipeline coming, giving us some visibility into 2025. And that gives us then the group CAGR of about 10%. And you've heard Christian comment that we talk about accelerated growth through 2027. And this seems to be a little bit contradictory to my prior statements, where I said I'm not willing to give any guidance what's happening between after 2025. Why do I have that confidence? I do have that confidence to make that statement because if you just do the mathematics and continue that game I was playing for next 2 years, for another couple of years, you see that even if you dial down the Cloud ERP suite, which on the Sankey chart I've shown is the lion's share of it and it will become bigger and bigger in the mix of cloud revenue, even if you decelerate and even if you double the decline in everything else, which is software support and services from minus 4% in our bridge from '23 to '25, if you double that decline, I'm still accelerating the CAGR from '25 to '27 by 2 percentage points. That's just a mix effect. And don't nail me on that numbers. But I just give you the numbers that you build your own small models to do that, and then you can take your own assumptions, how it's kind of decelerating. But the key message is we are accelerating if each of our revenue streams are deteriorating in growth. Does it make sense? So that's the key message. And this is why we have a certain confidence, and even I feel there is enough wiggling room for us to make that commitment that the growth will accelerate post 2025. And all the qualitative reasons, which are there to support that, I think, have been nicely evidenced by my colleagues here. Now a little bit more specifics on the AI journey, 300 million users. Here, I just wanted to give you a feeling about where they sit. That is important because you see they're actually sitting, to a large degree, still in high-cost country, in high-cost regions. So that means there's a significant salary base behind that. And AI will be a weapon for our customers to combat the strong continuous inflationary pressure on that huge salary base. I see that in my own shop. I mean I try to be exemplary. I keep the cost contained. There's onslaught of regulatory requirements. There's growth. There's new business models, a lot of new stuff to do. And how do we do that without kind of increasing the number of people? And then on top of that, I have the inflation. So I start on the back foot. We, SAP, have 69% personnel expense in our cost mix. Cost mix, not revenue mix. And actually, that excludes the temps we have and all the labor cost impact and the hyperscalers and so forth. So labor is all over the place. And that's true for a lot of companies. We also have seen the 5 million above quotas before. If you think about what's the typical cost base per head count for those? And if you can make them more productive at similar rates that already today in standard coding languages, you make coders more productive. You see we talk about non-negligible amounts that can be very accretive in that timeframe, '26, '27, when it's really deployed. So that's one of the things that we can sustain. And you've heard about the kind of Morgan Stanley guess of EUR 150 million enterprise application market for AI. There are some other forecasters like Gartner, IDC being a little bit lower, but that's the order of magnitude we talk about. And of course, we want to have our fair pound of flesh in that. Now the perpetual debate about the conversion of our installed on-prem base into cloud. The good news is we are just in the early innings of that. You've seen that we were actually not declining so much. We have that EUR 11 billion plus phase in 2023, and we have 2 charts here. One is by customer category. So you see there's only a quarter which are already paying maintenance today, but already also paying cloud revenues. So they are already on the journey, they have been embarking on that journey, and they are in a gradual process of transforming to the cloud. And this is not a cliff. It's not that they kind of switch from on-prem to cloud immediately, but it's a long-term journey in some cases, BMW was mentioned in years. So this is why that cloud ERP suite growth rate is so remarkably stable. But because it's a hugely diversified portfolio in terms of regions, in terms of industries and in terms of the customer journey, the timing of these transitions. So it's really diversification to the power of 3. And there's still a lion's share of that installed base that is either on S/4 or ECC and has not even been generating any cloud revenues and just needs to start fueling our cloud revenue growth. And now why are we so confident that we take them on the journey of that kind of -- whatever it is 2/3, 3/4. I'd say maybe very roughly 1/4 is not kind of into the S/4 journey yet. So there's only a quarter of that remain to do that has not committed to S/4 in somewhere yet that has either bought a license on S/4, has kind of started to transition to S/4. So it means whoever is joining the S/4 journey, we have a very high confidence level that they don't do that grinding to go to S/4, just to abandon afterwards and go somewhere else. I mean I've seen it on the customer side, what it means to transform to that kind of tool chain. It's a very comprehensive transformation project. I dare say that in terms of load and work to get from ECC to S/4 versus S/4 to rise, that's the big heavy lifting. So they basically have put the chips on the table and bet on SAP already. And the other ones are sometimes procrastinating people. We don't have the budget for that yet. There is, of course, also a shift directly from ECC to a RISE journey. So we are highly confident that the lion's share of this kind of remain to do will come our way. And then there's a question about timing. So it's not so much a question about if but when. And for a lion's share of these people, there is actually the maintenance -- the ordinary maintenance, the mainstream maintenance running out by end -- end of 2027 and end of 2030, we have also extended maintenance running out. And by the way, those who fall into the extended maintenance have an increase in maintenance fees, which will stabilize maintenance fees. But our interest is not to keep them there because when they're stuck there, they will not consume our innovation. And we want to win our customers by great products and great experience and not by kind of increasing maintenance fees. But if we have to, we have to. So now we move further right gross profit. I mean it's not a secret that on the software and support, we have a higher gross margin than on cloud, but you know that kind of 2 to 3x conversion factor. So absolute gross profit is actually boosted by that transformation. There is always a discussion about the mix effect from private cloud becoming very, very big, and therefore, diluting also the gross profit on the cloud revenues. But let's not forget, we're also reducing the kind of very low-margin infrastructure as a service business. We are boosting the gross margin itself. There's a lot of initiatives currently running beyond the next level of transformation, which helped boost gross margin. Yesterday, there was a very important announcement -- it was the day before yesterday that we are doing this Graviton journey with our hyperscaler partner, so to come really to a more efficient, lower power consumption, also green air deployment mode. So a lot of interesting initiatives in the pipeline to boost the gross margin. But I have to say that the lion's share of that gross profit commitment of EUR 16.2 billion for 2025, the growth is predominantly driven by the revenue growth. So the heavy lifting on that kind of growth on gross profit is really on the revenue and then there's a kind of uptick, a slight uptick on the gross margin side. So the real margin expansion opportunity lies on the OpEx that, as Scott has mentioned. He wants to make this machine much more efficient to get more bang for the buck, and there are great initiatives currently running. There is also a recognition that on R&D, we can become more efficient, so we are pruning the long tail of less successful initiatives, focusing our R&D money more. We are looking at what we call organizational health KPIs and R&D. If we have too many bosses for the number of quotas we have and they might sit in some locations, remote from their teams. We bring them together. This is actually why we invested kind of EUR 2.2 billion plus to rightsize these things and come back to a more efficient setup. I'd say on G&A, we have a super important initiative, and Sebastian Steinhaeuser is in the room where we are really merging all the operations clusters, every board area in SAP had an operations cluster, then I give you one wonderful example. Scott and I, we love to work together. But it's not a secret that he wants to have flexibility for the customers. I want to have [ brutal ] standardization to really run it through the machine very efficiently, book it in an automated way. And before the teams have been optimizing their local optimum. Now they sit all in the same team. And I'm very, very optimistic that we'll find the right balance between these things to find the right modularization with the customer. On the other hand, become more agile on finance with AI to be better in catering to the diverse needs of our customers to automate that stuff away. So this is how we want to really drive the operating profit to the levels we've shown for 2025. And again, sorry for repeating, it's not only about driving that margin up. It's about changing gradient of cost increase versus the revenue increase to a benchmark level, which again is quite visible in the kind of 80%, 90% in our competitors. I don't want to say where exactly we end up there because it's far out. But we see no reasons why we should not be at least as good as our competition in terms of hitting a reasonable decoupling of the total expense growth and OpEx in particular, from our revenue growth. Now comes cash conversion. I already gave you that the bridge in '25 is an easy one. I think those of you who've made the math understand it. Now the only open question is again on what's happening beyond '25 on cash conversion. But if we say we are generating EUR 8 billion free cash flow on EUR 10 billion non-IFRS operating profit, that's a pretty high conversion. And it's, of course, strongly benefiting -- it's, of course, strongly benefiting from the fact that stock-based compensation shifts more to equity. Now the question is how will that evolve going forward? And honestly, I think this is a reasonable assumption to stay at the level. Why? Because, yes, there is a lot of opportunities to work on working capital to be more light on CapEx. We work on all the things. By the way, all these initiatives meet a certain resistant from those who have to pay earlier as an example. Collection improvements, the type of things we can do there, the hyperscaler prepayments to make sure that we get a really good discount for that, that is outweighing the cost of the capital. These are all initiatives that take time, but the kind of tailwind we have from that stock-based compensation, which is equity settled in that conversion calculation, will not grow to the same degree as the revenues grow. So we need operational improvement to kind of offset that kind of headwind going forward. So I think I have no better assumption myself than saying the cash conversion is actually in 2025, where it should sit because we will need to gradually improve to make sure it's not coming so much more out of the stock-based compensation. In my words, you can also imply that we will be very disciplined on trying to not increase stock-based compensation more than necessary. I think there was a very fast ramp on that in the past, and we're currently curbing it. We said in our transition from the non-IFRS pre stock-based compensation to post that about EUR 2 billion will there -- will be a rough ballpark for 2025, and we will contain that as much as we can. So it will grow for sure, more slowly than the revenues. And this is what you see depicted here, that journey. Now one thing is about cash conversion and how we generate cash, now it's about how to deploy it. And what is the pecking order, so to speak. For 2024, the biggest investment is actually the dividend itself and restructuring. We announced an acquisition today. And I think it's a very good one. So there's also the need to, how should I say, gradually improve the dividend. So we'll couple the dividend growth, of course, with our earnings growth. And there's one tweak I would like to make. We had in the past a definition of our dividend policy that was based on the kind of IFRS operating profit. And the problem was that the payout ratio was super volatile because Sapphire Ventures was growing all over place with the fluctuations in the market. And now we have changed the definition in non-IFRS operating profit, excluding the volatility of Sapphire Ventures. So we feel that the non-IFRS operating profit is actually the much better way to look at the payout ratio. And we say minimum 40% of that. So that gives you a floor that whenever our non-IFRS operating profit will grow, that you will also see the dividend grow accordingly. And if then still there's excess cash. There's, of course, more measures looming on returning capital to shareholders. You know that we are still in the middle of executing that EUR 5 billion share repurchase. I think by now, we are close to EUR 1.7 billion being done, that's about 12 million shares. And now for '24, given what we've just done, there will be not much cash to share. But in '25, we will approach that end of the EUR 5 billion, and then it's the right time to discuss what's happening next. I want to mention in the context that our rating has improved. We've been upgraded by both agencies by now to A+ and A1 and the good news is we have not made any commitments on capital structure that will tie us the hands. We really want to kind of stabilize our ratings on a very high level, more on our ability to generate recurring cash flows then on a super kind of excess liquidity cushion. It's about really a very high predictability of the cash flows, strong cash flow generation. And we've seen the rating agencies reacting to that already in saying there's a different business model now in place. We give you the upgrade. By the way, I'm not getting tired to tell our customers [indiscernible] rating then the customer itself because the weakest chain and link. If that system breaks, well, you're done. So this is I think what I want to share with you is there anything I missed, except for the summary. Yes, I mean, everything is pretty much on track. And we think that in terms of growth, in terms of cash conversion, free cash flow to sales, we are not yet where we can be, we think that post-'25, there's more to come. And thanks for your attention. And now I think we have a break. But before we go to the break, because I'm not sure if you want to use the break for some warm words, I wanted to ask Anthony also to come on the stage. And thank you very sincerely for the hard work you've done over the last 2.5 years in this room. He has been taking the tougher part of that journey. I came in when everything was already looking much better. So thanks for really laying the ground for the strong recovery over the recent years. Anthony has decided to leave the company, and I want to wish you really best of luck in your new endeavors. The good news is we have already from 1st of July, a new Head of Investor Relations. Some of you might know her, Alexandra Steiger. She is in the room. I think here she is. And yes, as you know, maybe she's been covering U.S. large cap Internet stocks like the Amazons of this world, Google and so forth. And I'm glad that Anthony and she can still exchange ideas. So I want to give you a very warm hand of applause and a very warm welcome, also to you.

Thank you very much, Dominik. So as you said, we will now take 10 minutes break, and you can prepare your questions. We'll come back with the Executive Board on stage, and we'll have an interact session together. Thank you. [Break]

Welcome back. So we have the Executive Board now on stage with us. We will take your questions in a minute. And before we do that, I think Muhammad, you wanted to share a video with the audience.

Yes. I mean I think I did more talking than I probably should as a product guy in the 35 minutes. And I know some of you might not have the demos I referred to yesterday, so we actually have created a small 1.5 minutes long video that shows the experience as well as the AI and how that really shows up in context to make the point that I was making. So if that's okay with you, we'll start with that 1.5 minutes to hopefully get you energized and then we'll dive into questions. [Presentation]

All right. So we have some micro notes here in the room, but I would like to welcome Gina to the stage. Gina is our Chief People Officer. And maybe as an icebreaker, Gina, I would like to ask you, you have been with SAP for a few months now, I think, 4 months. So maybe you can share some insights and introduce yourself to the audience.

Yes. Pleasure. Thanks, Anthony. And also a warm welcome from my side. Yes, SAP is a fantastic company. It's a very warm and welcoming culture. So I got a lot of help in my onboarding and a very informal culture as well, and that helps me also to connect and get the information. So I really like it a lot. What comes to mind first is the high customer centricity, high people orientation. And I think we could also observe the innovation power we have at SAP. So happy to be here.

Thank you. So now we will open for questions. So maybe we can start with Frederic here.

Fred at Bank of America. I'm going to start with a question that I have to ask about current trading. Listening to Scott, very bullish message on pipeline in the beginning of the year. there's a lot of softness around in terms of enterprise spending environment. So maybe start with by addressing that point earlier on. And then maybe a second question on your cloud ERP growth. Maybe, Dominik, I mean you mentioned maintaining that 30-plus growth rates in the medium term. I mean in the next 2 years. Can you maybe share the underlying assumption there? In particular, if we look at gross -- outside of X4, last year it was about 15%. So do you think that specific piece can accelerate? I mean so I understand you have a bit of your assumptions behind that.

Do you want me to comment on that first? So on the pipeline side, the reason for the strength is data. The data suggested. It's not a sentiment. It's not a -- based on a singular customer conversation frankly, it's not even based on what I expect to be a really positive effect out of an event like Sapphire where you get the collective effect and the compounding effect this week and next week. The reality is there is some segments, some industries, some markets where there is softening. So it's not like there is a consistent overwhelming emphasis. But even though even with that, IT budgets are increasing. The AI -- the power of AI is moving quickly to drive to be about value being delivered from a business usage and how the business is going to get benefit out of this. And we've got the incredible customer base that is looking to be able to seize the opportunity of that, and we're giving them the pathways easier than ever before. So it's a combination of effects that gives us that confidence. And ultimately, the data represents that the pipeline strength and the sentiment as well as our ability to be able to facilitate that opportunity easier than we've done, and that's been intentional gives us that confidence. I'd also argue that it's still highly competitive. Pipeline is great, but every single -- every single deal that we do, every single opportunity is still a competition. And for installed base customers, the biggest competition is doing nothing. And so the transformation suite, I was going to mention it before, but I missed the opportunity. The transformation suite of capabilities overcomes that inertia which can often be the case because it's working, it's using it. It's not broken because they've run with SAP for a long period of time, but with confidence that the transformation is going to be successful. It lowers the barriers of resistance. And that's why we're seeing deal speeds actually accelerate, deal values increase as well as the volume -- the value and the velocity of the pipeline improve. So it's a [ varietal ] effect, but I assure you I look at this way more than I do the sales data because that gives me an indication of what's coming.

Maybe on the cloud piece, just to be very precise, what I said, I said that the 32% growth we've seen in Q1, if you kind of use that for both '24 and '25, it would kind of triangulate perfectly well with the guidance for '24 and '25. So in some way, that's right. I also said that, then -- I want to highlight that when I said the stress test and go down by 4 percentage points 1st of January 2026, that's not something I expect to happen. That's just a sensitivity analysis to demonstrate that despite such an adverse event, the consolidated growth will accelerate. So in terms of how that all comes together, I think the biggest thing we always discuss is besides the -- the CCB, which gives us visibility on the subscription outlook. And of course, now we are in the late innings of H1, so we start to get visibility in the first half of next year with that measure. That gives me the confidence of maintaining that kind of 30% plus, 32% picked as a ballpark. And yes, we did embark in that logic, some haircuts for transactional business as we have done in the prior quarters. So you know that we've guided for '24 flat transactional business. We are assuming that the headwind, which is a couple of percentage points on '24 revenues because of the lower growth or no growth actually that this headwind will ease slightly in '25 because it's a smaller part of the mix, and we do see a moderate pickup on growth on that front. So I'd say there's pretty much continuity to assume neither any euphoric things that will fall into our lap suddenly, nor any major meltdown. So it's a pretty steady evolution, I'd say, which is embarked in the Cloud AP suite number.

Very good. Thank you. Maybe on the first row.

It's Adam Wood from Morgan Stanley. Maybe first, Gina, can I ask you a question? For growth companies like SAP, it's quite rare to go through big restructuring plans fortunately. You're going through a big one in a minute. And at the same time, I think you may be being a little bit more demanding about employees coming back into the office. Could you just talk a little bit about how you manage morale in the company? How you're seeing things as you go through those 2 changes? And particularly on the restructuring plan that's partly voluntary, how do you ensure that you're keeping the employees that you want to keep? Because often when it's a voluntary plans is the people that know they can get jobs elsewhere, they leave very quickly. And then maybe secondly, the 2 -- I was going to ask around what comes after 2025. But Christian [ sense a good job ] earlier in the presentation. I won't ask that. But on the 2 to 3x, it obviously gives us a very big range of outcomes of what can come into cloud subscription for maintenance. Could you just talk a little bit about what you need to do? What products you need to sell to get to 3 rather than 2? And how that's been kind of trending over the last few quarters?

Gina?

Yes. No, thanks for the question. So first of all, I think it's always important when you have to handle ambidexterity how I call it because we have to, on the one hand side, invest in growth, but also manage your transformation. You have to make sure that you are keeping -- that you're keeping an eye on the employee experience. And as I think where we have also picked a couple of initiatives. When it comes to back to office, for example, we have a complete program in other locations all over the world that we also have bodies on site that we're also doing events that we are close to the employees. I think it's important to create communication platforms, communication channels and that you also hear the feedback and that we can also react on the feedback. And we also have now the #Unfiltered launch. That means also here, we are listening to the voice of our employees, and then we can also see where are we and where maybe we also have to act a bit more. So this is one element. And I think also leadership is a very important part. You have to be in the room, you have to be close. And this is also day-to-day management, I think, where we try really to keep up employee morale. Yes.

And Adam, maybe just to build on what Gina said also on the way how people now will exit the company. I mean we have a very -- still, yes, it's a voluntary in Germany. But we also there have also we as SAP opened the door only for certain job profiles. And we are also allowed to say for top performers. We are not debating here exit. And so the people know very well which job functions are targeted. So it's -- and of course -- but because of social labor wide, you have to do this voluntary, but we still did it where we targeted. And what Dominik said, the acceptance-wide good, also in the places where we want it. But with Gina now, we have concrete workforce plans, especially in engineering to say what kind of profiles do we need, yes? Because the worst thing what now can happen? We do a great job on the restructuring. But then also to Dominik's point, we want to build a company who then can scale a lot. The same is true for -- for Scott's area. And then the morale, when you work for a winning company, when I walk into the labs, there's pride. And we are not a [ dinosaur ]. So we are growing fast. We are growing faster than the competition. And this winning culture also moves more well. Now the back to office is the most popular topic, no. But we also on a very good track in the meantime. So the emotions are coming down, people enjoy like coming together, we do all hands. We do certain things to also activate the people to come back, and we are on a very good track. So I feel we are on the positive side. Then with regard to the portfolio, I mean, where do we expect this growth coming from? I mean just take maybe one line of business, it's the supply chain area. So demand and supply is working. We are pushing back a lot of best of breed who actually could come in there in the last years. But now we are moving into manufacturing. We are moving on transportation. We're moving into warehouse management. Like this portion of customers started this now, but we have thousands of them. And this is highly strategic. And so we have a lot of customers who still now expand from demand/supply planning into design to operate. And I guess pretty similar is when I look into -- for example, take HR, Employee Central, super strong, the Nestlés, the Microsoft, they are running on SAP SuccessFactors Employee Central. The next one is let's modernize the payroll. So with ADP, we will come up there with an offering on cloud modernization, take the modifications out of our next-generation payroll. Unbelievable market. By the way, also with AI, when we tell them AI, the automation story on top. And now you can pick one line of business. So some modules are more advanced and some others will now pick up endlessly. I mean the planning side, I said this also, we are very good in the Analytics Cloud on reporting, predictive planning. Yes. BMW does end-to-end planning, Siemens does end-to-end planning, but this is now massive because what -- on the engineering side, we are now coupling the workforce with the financial plan, the spend, we do supply chain planning and now all comes together. We prefill it with content. So I mean the planning market alone is huge. And so there are areas, again, which we push where I feel there is definitely a lot of way to further accelerate our growth. And then, of course, as Muhammad said, it's embedding AI, embedding AI and to make this also more intelligent.

Mohammed?

It's Mohammed Moawalla from Goldman Sachs. Two questions. One is when we think of that Extension Suite, and you said that you were sort of unhappy with sort of the high single-digit growth. And maybe Scott is the right person for this. What do you think kind of has failed in the past from a go-to-market and sales organization standpoint that you think you can correct? Or is it now the fact that the product that Muhammad talked about that we're moving from a monolithic to a much more kind of modular cloud-based architecture that may kind of facilitate a better cross-sell? And I know you touched on some of the categories now. But when you look at things like CRM, where perhaps historically, SAP has been a bit further behind, but there was a lot of talk on Sales Cloud yesterday. So I'd be curious to get an understanding on kind of what drives that and how quickly. The second was speaking to a lot of the partners on the floor that there's clearly still this supply shortage of consultants and customers trying to hit the '27 deadline. So keen to get your perspective in terms of any thoughts on the maintenance deadline or how that conversation goes with customers with regards to working around the deadline and what flexibility you may offer.

Yes. So I won't talk about my predecessors and the challenges maybe they face. But what I would say is -- the major pivot that we've made on a go-to-market is not competing on our competitors' terms. Our competitors want a best-of-breed game. They want -- they want SAP in its silos to compete head-to-head. So when we're going on an ERP discussion or we're going to go on a HR discussion or a supply chain or even on a data discussion and to add to Christian's comments about the opportunities, the data opportunity for SAP, the fidelity and the importance of our data is incredible. So it partly is because of the product capabilities that have enabled us to compete against that more effectively. It's partly the transformation portfolio. But I guess I would also argue, once we're no longer competing on those terms, we're embracing the fact that we've got a suite of capability that's in a modular way that the incremental benefits you get by doing piece by piece is far outweighs the best-of-breed mindset, and we're leveraging that coexistence of markets, no -- companies no longer wanting complexity in their landscape. So the 2 go hand-in-hand. The second is -- and again, I'm -- it pains not to be critical of the past, but the go-to-market was really no one was focused on the revenue line growing faster than the bottom line. So a lot of our investments were always about pouring fuel into the go-to-market, not about the efficiency of the go-to-market. And Christian 3.5 years ago, when he asked me to take on his role, was clearly emphasizing the growth that we needed to facilitate, but it's not growth at all costs. It needs to be profitable growth. And so things like the digital hub, things like our partner ecosystem scaling for us, the ability to be able to do cross-sell and upsell without increasing the sales coverage, getting more throughput with our customer success teams, very conscious strategies that you might not have seen the fruits of those changes 2 years ago, 3 years ago when I first implemented, but now we're getting the machinery. So that -- that means that we're efficient, and we're competing on terms that are more favorable to SAP than we were before.

And maybe just to emphasize, I mean, I was sitting here today a little bit with a smile on my face because it's -- I mean it's land and expand. It's a team. And so many things have come together so well. I mean it starts with the product. We better don't sell a bundle and you better don't talk about land and expand if the products don't talk to each other. If this now comes together, Scott has now all the ingredients also on the sales side to really cross-sell and land. But then also the commercial piece. I mean it's unbelievably hard to rationalize the metrics to really then also find the [ wide ] commercials. The IT systems have to cater for that. Dominik's team on the [ FX ] side, everything has to come together. And that is now really coming together better than any time before. And so it's not in a silo. It's really a one team. And this packaging is really now helping us on this land and expand. And yes, clearly, some of the ingredients here, someone was working here a little bit decoupled on pricing. The product is something to go to, but it's really clicking. And this is very important. It's sometimes behind the scenes, this is hard work, what you have to do.

And I'll just add specifically on the sales and the CX side since you brought that up, more as an indication that from a product perspective, the mindset we want to have for the rest of the portfolio as well as I think I hope -- I'll just be as transparent here as I can be. And if you need to kick me, you can kick me here. Listen, I've been at SAP for 2.5 years in this role, roughly about 8 weeks, but the transition was announced in January. But I'll say this, having been in Dynamics and sort of built and ran the customer engagement application there, which arguably is probably #2 in the market now. Listen, I was a bit of a skeptic coming into this role in having that portfolio to say listen, can the product win even if we have it. Certainly, the conceptual value prop is their front office, back office, but does it product have legs or not? And I'll tell you, the thing -- the reason why we're so deeply committed as an organization now to this CX story as well is the strength of the product first and foremost. It's not because we wish it because we want it because it makes sense. We don't want to let it go because of the strength of the product. And that's what convinced Scott to say, hey, he's going to -- he's willing to sort of bet his team on running on this platform as well. And we've announced that yesterday. And I'll tell you, the product is, A, intelligent. You saw, B, the TCO of this product on the sales side is pretty phenomenal. I'll tell you, for the first 10 years, Dynamics only grew -- well, I don't know if I could say this part. But the story there was the TCO is better than the alternative there and that helped Dynamics a lot in the early years as well. We're far better from a product depth and stability perspective, plus we have an amazing TCO story with a really modern platform architecture. And then we highlight and win on our terms, which is to say this integration with the front-end back office, not many people can do. I can probably count them in 2 fingers on how many organizations in the world can really do that. And that then truly creates that strength. And then we want to win in the installed base that we have, first and foremost, and be #1 there. And I think if you even look at where we are from a traction perspective, at least in the CPG space and retail execution, we're clearly the incumbent, but I think we can even grow more from there. But that's sort of the mindset that we're bringing to the rest of the -- the best of breed in an integrated composable best of suite. That's sort of the tagline that hopefully, you guys can believe it, that's sort of where we're at and even doubling down on more.

But just to amplify the point, that great product, and I took some convincing and I was absolutely convinced and I didn't start there that great product, we are going to go to market, leveraging that great product, but we're not going to do it in a way that the competitors of that product are going to want. We're going to use the suite capabilities embedded in growth, all the things that we talked about, that allows us to differentiate and access a market that is very hard for our competitors to beat.

Very good. Second row, Mark had a question.

Mark Moerdler, Bernstein. Two questions, if you don't mind. Dominik, how do you think about the impact of GenAI on development on R&D, on G&A? When do you -- is it something that's going to happen near term, long term? What does it do to the economics of the business? And then Muhammad, on the technology side, everyone seems to be adding a data sphere or a data cloud, what creates the competitive differentiation?

Maybe on the R&D productivity, and I think you referred to our own game for SAP. Of course, we had in the budgeting process, interesting debates about how much we can dare put into the budget. And I'd say we have been pretty cautious. And I think the data on the productivity we can measure is getting quite good. So there are really experiments, so to speak, with the same code being written with people enabled with the tools and people not enabled and then we can compare the two. And you would not be surprised to hear me say that kind of the announcements of the vendors is a little bit more frothy and optimistic than what we measure there. But from a CFO point of view, the complete no-brainer that is kind of super quick payback. It's a lot of value for the money you invest, and it's ramping. And we are not embarking in '24, the ultimate productivity from these tools and development throughout the organization. We really start the tip of the iceberg in '24 and '25, '26 is broad adoption. And then using numbers which are not quite as high as what the vendors communicate, but also not ridiculous numbers. So I don't want to get any more details there. But it's not different from what I hear. I mean it's the first question I ask any CFO colleague of mine who has a lot of coding people, what do you use for that, and it's quite standard on that. On G&A, it's very use case specific. I mean there's some things where we are pushing [ boost ] productivity because of really leapfrogging and quantum jump improvements like on quoting, configure price quote. We need to double the growth in the company in 3 years, and we don't want to hire a single more person for that. So there's massive productivity leaps because these have been highly complicated processes, but where AI can do a lot of good things, screening tons of data quickly and sorting out things that humans cannot sort out that quickly. There are other things which are quite complicated. I mean really doing tax advisory just with a large language model, can I really trust that yet? Not sure I want to kind of pack my CFO career on that. So it's a mixed bag, but we do need these tools to hit our plans. And the good news is, in the first innings of that journey, we see that actually when there is a clear commitment to a target, and we have been reasonable about the target setting, people get creative and the good news is SAP as an engineering organization has a DNA to really drive towards that.

Yes. And Mark, I mean, of course, before Sapphire, before we now launched tool for developer, of course, it's embedded and we did intensive testing. And if the results would not be really, really good, we would not have launched it because I mean, it's all about sharing what we are going to do, but then deliver on. And then the second, just look at the AI document extraction service. Now our contracts are sometimes per se too long. We are working on that. But you wouldn't imagine how much time we can save just by the documents, the contracts are getting screened about all the SLAs adhere to a certain guidelines, what about [indiscernible] rules, other [indiscernible] adherence has established with this contract? And so we see already the first use cases, which are very powerful in order to achieve exactly what Dominik just outlined.

And from a development perspective, we are -- I think we've nearly rolled out GitHub Copilot to all of our developers and seeing very positive feedback from them in terms of both acceleration and use and adoption. And we're certainly using generative AI and other things like pipeline management that, again, brings a lot more reliability and quality into the process, too. And we're seeing benefits of that as well. But I tell Dominik that because of this, I can reduce, I probably won't tell them that. I think we probably still need more developers as all of my directs tell me, but we, for sure, are leveraging that. On the data question, I mean I think Datasphere for us is landing well with customers because it solves the problem. It sort of provides the value that the customers are looking for. And I think ultimately, from a SAP perspective, the value for us lies in the shape of the data that we have across that end-to-end business process chart, if you remember, and the data itself and the insights and the planning that Christian talked about as well. And we're just sort of laser-focused on making sure that we can unlock that for our customers even more so than what we have today. So the question that you asked earlier, the first question, I think there's a set of products we have are going to continue to double down on them. And we're actually continuing to think that how do we sort of unlock the power of data even more because that's really the new currency from an AI perspective, too. So look for more things to come there, too. But certainly, we're seeing a tremendous amount of momentum and traction with Datasphere already.

Jackson?

Jackson Ader at KeyBanc Capital Markets. A quick one for Dominik. It's actually one of Adam's questions that he had earlier. So the 2 to 3x uplift in support to subscription. So how do you have some control and like modulate that maybe toward 3x, if you can? And is that what is required in order to keep cloud ERP growth at this 32% range because I would think that while large numbers, that's going to be harder as we move through the quarter.

I'd say the fluctuations we see quarter-by-quarter are still in the kind of noise range. So I wouldn't see a trend that this is improving or going down. I'd say it's pretty stable development on that 2 to 3x. And in terms of the assumption, it's not the only assumption in our Cloud AP suite growth. There's a lot of other pieces that drive that retention rates. But there is, I'd say, also on that front, a more steady evolution that we see, which is good news because if you think about the type of gross margin we make on-prem versus the uplift and then the relative gross margin cloud, even private cloud versus -- it's ID accretive. So I think we can very well live with that type of conversion ratio. And of course, it's a different customer to customer, but that you can comment on.

Yes, maybe just to add to that. We do have tight guardrails around how we manage that because clearly, we don't want to convert, but then the benefits gained is going to be eroding over a period of time, to your point. A good example. We rolled out a -- what we talked about a transformation incentive, a migration incentive. One of the things that customers are doing is when they go from their old ERP, usually an ECC, but even if it's a competitive one, they're running T&E. They're running procurement. They're running CRM. They're running supply chain. They're running different capabilities. And so being able to give them an acceleration of incentive on the multi-cloud from the get-go means that we're able to then manage that and then get that 2 to 3x. So and then we're not relying only on the core finance ERP, but the full suite of capabilities. And then the second is, we are very focused on whilst our agreements and our contracts are quite long in duration on the Cloud ERP suite, the ramps and the way we manage time to value, both from their terms and also from ours is a really strong consideration because the last thing that we want to do is move them to our cloud, but having a lower -- sort of being able to maintain that and actually even accelerate the time to value, which AI is a key element, so usability early becomes a key element in the future is that these are just some of the factors that we look at to make sure we govern it.

Maybe one point on the pricing side. I guess one of the best ideas we also had in the last 3 years was we implemented a module on the incentive side to say we have the list price. And then after discount, we actually implement the target price for our sellers. And so you're not only incentivized anymore on volume, but also on price. And you wouldn't imagine how powerful this is. So when sometimes tech companies are talking about, oh, we're increasing list prices by another 5% doesn't mean anything. You can discount and then it's gone. But what we are seeing is a consistent increase of our discounted list price. And that is, of course, super powerful. And then we see where we land price-wise. And that led to the fact that our discounts without now showing any more details, but is much lower than in the on-prem as well. And that is, of course, super important because when we are talking about this ramp, it's super important what kind of price you come out at the end of the ramp because that is then the recurring revenue and the recurring margin you are getting out of there. And that was a very powerful lever for us, I have to say -- to also then secure the 2% to 3% multiple. Yes.

Quick follow-up, sticking with you, Christian. I think one of your early slides is talking about like focus, scalability, innovation, right? So how do we square the need to focus and possibly continue to rationalize the product set with the other mandate to cross-sell and go functional in line of business and how do we square it with the WalkMe acquisition announced this morning?

Yes. That's a good one. Look, when we started this journey 4 years ago, I mean, there were way too many products, I would say, in the outer range of our core processes we are running. When we did our thing on Qualtrics, which was good, just in time than we did by design. We really lifted and shifted a lot of developers in S2S for public cloud. We did the marketing piece where we now have strong partnerships in place. But everything not really around lead to cash, procure to pay, this is core. And so we actually we reinvested a lot of developer capacity and go-to-market capacity to where it matters to SAP. I mean Dominik showed also a very good chart on how much -- how big is now our cloud ERP revenue stream and what is left. We are constantly looking at what is left? Yes, we do. And so it's our job to not only announce meaningful acquisitions. It's also our job to constantly rationalize and -- but again, not hurting our -- we would never ever go out of something which really sits in the core because that is super important. Because when you look at that, I mean oftentimes, the customers start with the order management with the billing, then they go to configure price quote and then they go to the pipeline management. And the last piece to your question around WalkMe, there was another question, hey, how actually is now [ Joule ] maybe interfering with WalkMe, can [ Joule ] not do the same thing. We, of course, discussed -- we know the product really well. If now WalkMe would be a learning platform or e-learning, then we would say no way. That's not worth an acquisition. But this guided experience, so that after every release, you can guide the end users through new features and functions. We see this is so important for us. And again, the business case of WalkMe stacking up by embedding this solution now into all of our products. But there is even another line item in this business case, which means it's the renewal rate of the company because we definitely believe that we can increase the user adoption. We can increase the upsell with WalkMe. So this is a business case on its own, but for the first time, we have an additional business case where we say there's another line item which contributes to lower churn, higher adoption and more upsell. And that's why we did WalkMe.

Yes, there was a question back there. Michael?

Michael Briest at UBS. Scott, you teased us with some data there on net retention rates. I'm not expecting you to give a number, but do you feel you're in the top quartile of wherever you're benchmarking now, how much more to go for is on that. And I think you also -- part of the sort of the bundling and sales strategy changes involve partners in doing more. Where are you today on partners as a percentage of, I don't know, new business in a year and where should that be? And then Christian, I think last year, you gave us an insight into rise margins somewhere in the 60s. Can you give us an update on that?

So I'll go on the net retention rate first. So I guess there's a couple of data points, not just on what I shared, but also what you saw in the other presentations. So first of all, net retention rate, we are obviously pleased with the growth and the performance at an overall portfolio level, and there are some categories, for example, and I won't go into all the details, but our business technology platform net retention rate is remarkably strong. Because once you get on to use it for your integration, then your ability to do Extension, be able to do your build, be able to do your Datasphere and other capabilities. But I guess I would combine it with the Cloud ERP suite versus the Extension Suite. So there are some categories in our Extension Suite where you saw the growth not as high where if you can look at that, you can reasonably assume that the net retention rates on some of those categories are not as high as what they are on the core that Christian referred to where the growth in the retention rates really underpin that overall 6 percentage point improvement. The other thing that I would highlight, and I don't want to underemphasize what Christian just said, the retention rate is also about trying to monetize the value. We've been really deliberate through that pricing, through that strategy. if we've got the, let me call it, the pricing power that we're able to utilize that, so the benefits because we know the value that's being gained. So all of those things. So no, I don't believe where I would like to be, but we are in a comparison to our peers, we look favorable, we look very strong. On the partner side, very quickly. Our partner ecosystem has, as I mentioned before, between 2021 and 2023, our indirect, so our reseller business doubled and it grew considerably faster than the rest of the business. That was deliberate. That was our conscious strategy. And the thing that we did was being very clear about actually narrowing the focus at that mid-market to a small set of solutions rather than trying to take a portfolio, so grow with SAP. Now when we think about extending it with Sales Cloud and the others, we believe that we've got a true mid-market offering driven purely by our partner ecosystem. Over 80% is driven by that ecosystem today. So we're relying on the partners to do that. When it comes to the SIs, my call to action for the big systems integrators is pretty simple. When they're driving their RISE transformation, and they're all very bullish about their portfolio -- sorry, their opportunity in their pipeline. But we want to see them bring more of that end-to-end suite capability in their initial offerings and support the best-of-suite strategy that we have, and I think that we have got pretty considerable upside if we're able to do that more effectively. So that's certainly one of my focus areas.

Yes. And Michael, with regard to the private cloud margin, obviously, I cannot give you any detailed numbers, but I'm smiling because 3 years back, we discussed in the Executive Board about what is our target state for the margin. There were some who said 60% is the maximum. I always believe there is more because when you are in a ramp and you have a single tenant, you actually can put, of course, more and more workloads and it scales. And so we are well above the 60%. And now, I guess, what we did, thanks also to Muhammad and The Spirit of One SAP. So with Thomas now, having the CST, we also put our infrastructure, our private cloud, our public cloud, basic operations teams together because when you are provisioning onboarding, running systems, there are many tasks which you don't need to do 10x. And there are many tools, which you can still harmonize. Remember, we harmonized our infrastructure. And you remember you know how it has helped. And so there are further levers now what we are initiating. That will be just in our constant evolution. But there is -- I would say, we didn't reach now the end. So there is constant optimization work. We reorganize some teams, we are putting now our application life cycle management on top across all our solutions. You saw the ARM announcement yesterday with AWS. We have similar ideas with the other hyperscalers. So there is continuous work ongoing. So I have to say I'm very happy with the scale we have achieved in the meantime, and there's more to come.

Very good. I think we'll have to conclude the session for today and the program. So thank you very much for [indiscernible]. So let's take a final question then. Fair enough. Good, and we'll conclude afterwards.

Dominik, it's Keith Bachman from Bank of Montreal. I'll just keep it to one in the interest of time. But you mentioned the curve on the 2025 Ambition margins. And I just wanted to flesh that out a little bit in that if -- you've also talked about 80% to 90% kind of OpEx scale that is to say you grow OpEx at 89% of revenues. But I think if you look at '25, the OpEx scale has to be materially better than that.

But that's a very special -- I mean that's the restructuring program, which will bear its fruit in '25. So that's not the kind of end stage, steady-state ratio we are going to see. There is a higher -- so a better operating leverage from '24 to '25 because we really see the savings on the restructuring program kicking in. But we are not going to do one restructuring program after the other. And this is why it will be milder, so to speak, in '26, '27.

But can I just put -- so if we think about kind of the components of that margin accretion, if you take the restructuring program and then embed that into '25, is the OpEx leverage on that curve, so to speak, of 80% or something in addition to that, that gets you to the margins?

The OpEx leverage is by far the biggest one. And I think within OpEx, it's kind of the pecking order and setting marketing expenses, then R&D and then G&A because G&A is a smallest. So that's the kind of relative weighting in that kind of OpEx expansion.

And maybe just one point to add, which is very important. We are doing this restructuring, not only yes, we have this onetime impact, of course, Dominik is right. But what we are doing, for example, on next-gen selling is -- what we are saying is there's an operating model, some job profiles will disappear. We have too many. We are streamlining that. We are setting ourselves up. There is a better market segmentation on partner [indiscernible]. Mr. Steinhaeuser on the COO, IT side needs to -- we need them automate the whole thing for the partners just that they can sell. We participate, but there is no SAP person anyway coming into that [indiscernible] so that we are building these machines and the demand which we are generating via digital campaigns will be automatically routed to that. So this transformation, what we are now doing, taking people out, getting into new skills is also setting us up then for continuously more scale, just more efficiency gains we will have then on a constant basis. So it's very important, yes, it's a onetime thing, but it's setting us up for more scale in the future. And there are 5 more pillars, which we have which are now in the making.

Okay. On the efficiency, I also wanted to thank IR. I thought this was a nice event in terms of being concise but really informative. So appreciate it.

Thanks a lot.

Thank you very much. So that concludes our program now. Thanks for your attention. We have some follow-up with you later. And obviously, we'll see you next month at Q2 earnings. Thank you very much. Have a good one. Thank you.