SAP SE claimed the title of Europe’s most valuable public company, replacing Danish weight-loss drug maker Novo Nordisk A/S.
Shares of SAP, which have been powered by growing investor optimism over its cloud-based software, rose 1,6% on Monday, valuing the German company at about €314 billion ($340 billion). That tipped it past Novo Nordisk, whose shares have declined 16% this year as trials of the firm’s next-generation weight-loss shot, CagriSema, have disappointed.
SAP shares have risen 42% in the past year, fueled by customers’ accelerating pivot from traditional on-site servers to IT infrastructure on the cloud. That process has allowed the company to sell more lucrative products bundled with artificial intelligence features, boosting revenue growth.
Does anyone actually like their software? Anything by them I have ever seen has always been a slow and outdated piece of shit.
I think it was created by the Germans for the Germans. It has all the features required, like scripting language with verbs at the end of sentences and plenty of dreadful bureaucracy.
I think there’s just very little competition in the space at scale SAP supports and companies are reassured by using something standard where they can hire lots of external consultants to make SAP even more dreadful.
As a german it is beyond me how this software got so popular. But businesses love those user nightmares. I recently had to work with Teamcenter from Siemens - nope nope nope nope.
I only know SAP because my partner works in master data at an engineering firm but my personal mortal enemy is Pega Client Lifecycle Management. I’ve been through 3 different companies trying to replace some legacy software with it. 2 gave up, current one is in the process of failing. Consultants are probably making a killing though. Those things get away with being clunky because they’re so configurable but I’ve never seen people happy with that configuration.
It’s actually become conventional wisdom in Germany that only the strongest of companies survive the introduction of SAP software, the other ones go bankrupt.
Despite what it may look like given all the configurability and add-ons and the highly-paid consultants, the major bit is that you need to adapt your thinking and processes to the SAP software. (I suspect that’s similar for Pega, although I’d never heard of the company prior to today.)
With this kind of budget there has to be a better way to organize data and permissions. They have infinite money and a lot of smart people at their company… And I am starring at poor quality icons and the most confusing structure I can think of.