SAP has just posted a 146% growth in operating profit. SAP third quarter software revenue grew at its fastest rate in a decade, as its operating profit soared 146% to reach €1.76bn, compared to €716m in 2010. The company’s total revenue was €3.41bn, compared to 2010 figures of €3bn, an increase of 14%.

Software revenue grew 28% to reach €841m, compared to €656m in 2010, while support revenue climbed 13% to reach €1.757m.

The Germany-based enterprise application software company said that efficiency gains combined with operational efficiency led to the record performance.

The company said that its pipeline continues to remain very strong and companies continue to invest in IT. It said that despite the uncertainty in “macroeconomic environment”, its outlook for 2011 remains unchanged.

Business intelligence is supposed to provide decision-makers with the insight they need. The growth in data is making it harder for people to gain meaningful insight because they can only track data on a quarterly or yearly basis. Increasingly, business leaders want to make decisions faster and this is putting the IT department under more pressure at a time when they are being asked to do more with less.

IBM (with Cognos), Microsoft, SAP (Business Objects) and Oracle have strong BI offerings. IBM and Microsoft lack ERP products that the other two can offer. But Gartner says so far it’s an open and heterogeneous position and increasing use of services in its value proposition are helping IBM to maintain par as a standard with SAP and Oracle.

However, in Gartner’s report, The Changing Attitudes of Business Intelligence Users, Gartner analyst James Richardson notes that, in 2011, more than 50% of IBM Cognos respondents stated that SAP or Oracle is their primary ERP and these firms will form a key battleground over the next few years for Cognos.

Richardson says: “The biggest loser in the standardisation battle is Microsoft, which has neither the strength in ERP nor IBM’s service provider touch to defend its position, and as such has fallen out of parity with the other three megavendors as a BI standard.”

SAP has reported record fourth-quarter results software revenue of €1.5bn (£1.27bn), up 34% compared with the same quarter in 2009. Software and software-related service revenue was up 27% on the previous year to €3.26bn and total revenue for the quarter was also up 27% to €4.04bn. According to SAP, this was the best software sales quarter in the history of SAP.

SAP’s strong results reflected a boost in the software market in the past year as companies in emerging markets, the US and parts of Europe made investment to support their economic recovery.

SAP reported software revenue for the full year of €3.26bn, up 25%, and software and software-related service revenue of €9.78bn, up 19%. Total revenue for 2010 was €12.45bn, an increase of around 17%.

That’ll help pay the $1.3bn damages that SAP has been ordered to pay to Oracle for the TomorrowNow case.

There goes the bell…..

A jury has awarded Oracle US$1.3 billion in damages in its corporate theft lawsuit against SAP, a blow to the German applications vendor, which had argued it should pay no more than $40 million for the software stolen by its TomorrowNow subsidiary.

Oracle said it was “the largest amount ever awarded for software piracy.” Members of its legal team embraced as the verdict was read in the U.S. District Court in Oakland, California, according to a person in the courtroom. Closing arguments had been presented Monday afternoon, so the jury took less than a full day to reach its decision.

It was not the full amount Oracle had asked for, but still considerably more than SAP had said it should have to pay. Oracle CEO Larry Ellison testified two weeks ago that SAP should be made to pay as much as $4 billion to cover the cost of the stolen software.

Round 1 to Larry.

The anger that exploded among users when SAP announced plans to impose a single, more expensive maintenance plan for all customers seems to have subsided a little in the light of a more conciliatory approach. Apparently, SAP has a new found willingness to listen, share and work more collaboratively with customers, particularly with regard to product roadmaps and establishing a two-way conversation with end-users.

Despite this progress, however, pricing and licensing remains a source of dissatisfaction for many of SAP’s customers. Without greater clarity and transparency around pricing, SAP could also run into problems with adoption of their new off-premise on-demand hybrid solution. Many suppliers have used complex pricing mechanisms to muddy their pricing models in order to confuse users and to enable higher costs to be charged. Let’s hope SAP really is listening this time as their current and historic pricing models have been unusually convoluted.

SAP has reported software and related service revenues of €2.3bn in preliminary financial results for the second quarter of 2010, up 16% compared with a year ago. Software revenues alone were up 17% to €637m and total revenues were up 12% to €2.9bn. Profit after tax was up 15% to €491m.

Bill McDermott, co-chief executive of SAP, said large, mid-sized and small enterprises are continuing to invest for growth across many industries

SAP also announced that it has completed the cash tender offer for all outstanding shares of common stock of Sybase. Sybase will operate as a separate company under current chief executive John Chen and remain focussed on its core database and information management business, SAP said.

In its business outlook, SAP said it expects software and software-related service revenue for 2010 to increase between 9% and 11% excluding the contribution of Sybase of six to eight percentage points.

Not a bad set of results and one indication that IT spend is on the up again after many months of crushing recessionary austerity.

Beware; the SAPman cometh. It appears as though SAP will be including new language into their licencing Agreements which may limit the contractual rights of its customer, potentially disallowing any future termination of maintenance and support services.  Hidden within a plethora of recent SAP announcements was the fact that SAP’s plans now include new language that suggests the only way it will contemplate any kind of maintenance and support services termination is if it applies to all its licensed software.  Clearly, SAP is responding to increased threats of competing support alternatives which allow SAP users to have some elements of their SAP portfolio supported by cheaper third parties. This “all or nothing” approach would appear tobe a straight forward attempt to eliminate a client’s ability to manage any kind of blended support solution and so reducing a client’s ability to pick and choose what is supported by SAP and what is not.

SAP is changing because it needs to find different ways to make money. Companies like SAP and Oracle are under some pressure to generate more revenues from their customer base. They are spending more time farming their client base for new revenues than they are hunting for new clients. So if you thought you had signed a big cheque to SAP a few years ago and that would be that, then think again. You’ve probaby noticed that your SAP sales rep is calling at least once a quarter now and his support team will be mining deep into your organisation to create new opportunities if none are currently on your budget plans. And you’ll be well aware of the furore created when SAP announced it was planing to raise it’s annual software maintenance and support costs from 17% to 22%. Still, it’s no all bad news and there is some good news filtering out; SAP as long been working towards changing its software licencing pricing policy to give greater choice. While you can still choose to pay for the whole lot upfront, they can also offer phased payments and subscription licencing. Remember to ask your SAP sales rep for financing options whenever they present a proposal to you.

Enterprise software vendor SAP has postponed the introduction of a controversial, more expensive support package, named Enterprise Support, until next year. The announcement shortly follows the resignation of two user group representatives from the project evaluating whether Enterprise Support would benefit customers. SAP announced in 2008 that Enterprise Support – which costs 22% of license fees annually, up from 17% in the current standard package – would be mandatory for all customers. A backlash from users forced the company to postpone the support plan until it could prove that the more expensive plan would benefit its customers.