SAP Profit Rises on Sales of Mobile Applications

SAP AG said first-quarter profitrose 7 percent as the largest maker of business-managementsoftware benefitted from demand for mobile applications and itsHana real-time analytics research.

Operating profit climbed to 834 million euros, the Walldorf, Germany-based company said today. Thatcompares with an 866 million-euro average estimate in aBloomberg survey of analysts. Revenue from software andsoftware-related services climbed 12 percent to 2.63 billioneuros. The company reiterated its full-year forecast.

SAP is winning business helped by demand for applicationsthat allow consumers and companies to access data viasmartphones and tablet computers. The company this week said itplans to spend nearly $500 million to lure clients to its Hanadata-processing product, challenging Oracle's dominance in the$22.5 billion database market.

Co-Chief Executive Officers Bill McDermott and Jim Hagemann Snabe aim to lift sales to more than 20 billion euros by 2015,compared with 14.2 billion euros last year. To get there andkeep up with rival Oracle Corp., the executives have acceleratedthe pace of SAP's acquisitions, adding mobile-software anddatabase provider Sybase Inc. in 2010 and cloud-computingspecialist SuccessFactors Inc. this year.

The majortechnology trends including big data

"SAP is so then positioned to capitalize on the majortechnology trends including big data, mobile, and cloud," thecompany said today. "SAP's and SuccessFactors' cloud portfolioshowed robust double-digit growth in billings year-over-year."

Siemens AG, Exxon Mobil Corp. and Wal-Mart Stores Inc. areamong more than 176,000 companies that use SAP's applications toorder goods, plan inventory levels and manage sales. SAP alsoprovides software for the order fulfillment system behind AppleInc.'s iTunes download system.

McDermott and Snabe want to expand SAP's customer base frominformation-innovation staff in back offices to includesalespeople wielding mobile devices and smaller customers morewilling to adopt on-demand applications.

The Hana research totaled 160 million euros in2011

Sales of the Hana research totaled 160 million euros in2011, beating SAP's own forecast by 60 percent. McDermott inJanuary forecast that revenue from Hana products will more thandouble this year.