SAP Headquarters, Building 1 Source: Wikipedia
During 2012 the Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) market experienced sluggish growth of just 2.2%, yet Software-as-a-Service (SaaS), financial management and Human Capital Management (HCM) applications showed potential for breakout growth.
Through the challenging times of the previous year however, SAP still retained worldwide market share leadership. These and other insights were recently published in the recent report, Market Share Analysis: ERP Software Worldwide, 2012 authored by Chris Pang, Yanna Dharmasthira, Chad Eschinger, Koji Motoyoshi and Kenneth F. Brant.
Key Take-Aways
- Overall market growth of just 2.2% and the top ten vendors owning 64% of the worldwide ERP market is leading Gartner to predict further consolidation of the industry.
- SAP had just over $6B in total ERP software revenue in 2012, leading the worldwide market with 24.6% market share. Oracle had $3.12B and Sage, $1.5B in software revenues for 2012. Oracle’s market share was 12.8%, and Sage, 6.3%. The following graphic shows worldwide ERP market share for 2012.
- Infor achieved 49.5% revenue growth in 2012, increasing their 2011 sales from $1B in 2011 to $1.5B in 2012. Their market share increased from 4.2% in 2011 to 6.2% in 2012.
- Microsoft achieved 4.2% revenue growth in 2012, increasing revenue from $1B in 2011 to $1.1B in 2012. The majority of these sales are for the Microsoft Dynamics AX ERP system.
- The fastest growing ERP vendors in 2012 include Workday, Cornerstone OnDemand, WorkForce Software, Ventyx and NetSuite.
- Workday grew 114.7% in 2012, increasing revenue from $88.6M in 2011 to $190.3M in 2012.
- Cornerstone OnDemand grew 61.5% in 2012, increasing revenue from $58.4M in 2011 to $94.3 in 2012.
- WorkForce Software grew 39.8% in 2012, increasing revenue from $11.8M in 2011 to $16.5M in 2012.
- NetSuite grew 34% in 2012, increasing revenue from $139.7M in 2011 to $187.1M in 2012.
- SaaS-based ERP revenues are projected to grow from 12% worldwide in 2013 to 17% in 2017. The following graphic from the report Gartner’s Market Trends: SaaS’s Varied Levels of Cannibalization to On-Premises Applications published: 29 October 2012 shows this progression. You can find a research roundup at the previous post SaaS Adoption Accelerates, Goes Global in the Enterprise, which provides additional insights into which factors are driving SaaS adoption.
Bottom line: SAP’s continued market dominance depends on how well the company orchestrates it core ERP strategy with the following areas: BusinessObjects 4.0, its highly regarded analytics suite; social application adoption (StreamWorks and SuccessFactors Jam); the many Cloud-based initiatives they have including SuccessFactors and BusinessbyDesign; mobility platform wins; and major wins with their SAP Sybase DBMS and HANA architectures.