SAP 3Q rises on license sales
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SAP AG, the world's largest maker of business-software applications, said Thursday its third-quarter profit rose 10 percent thanks to increased license sales.
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Business Objects reported a 19 percent rise in revenue for the third quarter, driven by services, but earnings were dragged down by a shortfall in license revenue, recent acquisitions and legal costs.While the income figures are broadly in line with preliminary results announced on Oct. 7, the company had expected its earnings to be better. The results come about two weeks after&#160;SAP announced plans to acquire Business Objects&#160;for $6.7 billion.Earnings for the quarter fell to $6.4 million, or $0.07 per share, from $19.6 million, or $0.21 per share, a year earlier, Business Objects said. It had predicted earnings of $0.16 to $0.20 per share.The earnings reported include a charge of around $7 million, equivalent to $0.05 per share, to settle litigation with Decision Warehouse. Business Objects had previously honored Decision Warehouse as its top distributor in Latin America: the company now resells products from&#160;Hyperion, which was recently bought by Oracle, and&#160;BEA Systems, which Oracle is trying to buy.Revenue for the quarter, which ended Sept. 30, was $369 million, up 19 percent compared to a year earlier. The growth was driven by revenue from services such as product maintenance, up 27 percent, and consulting and training, up 34 percent year on year.Growth in license revenue lagged, up just 6 percent compared to a year earlier, although license revenue from all product lines continued to grow, the company said.The&#160;acquisition of Cartesis, completed on June 1, and of&#160;Inxight Software, completed on July 3, added around $21 million in revenue for the quarter.Business Objects also profited from exchange rate fluctuations: while total revenue grew 19 percent year on year, at constant currency rates it grew just 15 percent, while license revenue grew 2 percent at constant currency rates.Business Objects warned that there&#39;s more uncertainty ahead -- and not just because of SAP&#39;s bid for the company, announced Oct. 7.The unexpected shortfall in third-quarter licensing revenue, added to uncertainty about customers&#39; future spending ahead of the merger, prompted the company to withdraw previously issued financial guidance.
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Robust demand from emerging markets in  Asia and Africa lifted third-quarter sales of all major handset  vendors from the previous quarter, with companies expecting  another sales boost from holiday shopping ahead.
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French car maker Renault said on Wednesday its third quarter sales increased 4.5 percent compared with the same period last year.
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Third-quarter profit jumped 77 percent, driven by growing sales of data storage software and hardware as well as a hefty gain from the sale of an ownership stake in VMware.
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Oracle Corp. reported revenue and earnings growth in its first fiscal quarter, with its revenue from new software licenses rising 7 percent, to $563 million.
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(InfoWorld) - SAP continued to ramp up its on-demand CRM offering this week, announcing that it will now include service-level capabilities, the third key component of CRM solutions. In February SAP kicked off its software as a service business with a sales force automation solution. In May the company added marketing, and in its third update within the year it is now announcing SAP Service. Liz Herbert, a senior analyst at Forrester Research, said that the SAP CRM solution is now displaying the kind of depth SAP is known for. "SAP added a component for managing products that many on-demand CRM vendors don't have. You can use it as the product master or bring in the product master which is typically found in the ERP system," said Herbert. The new service component includes Service Ticket Management, Rule-based Service Ticket Distribution, and Service Level Monitoring. Also included is a rules-base service-level determination calculator that automates the routing of service tickets based on a customer's service level agreement, said Angela Bandlow, vice president at CRM Solutions Marketing. "It's a tiered service that tracks SLAs based on the customer and the required response time," said Bandlow. One of the key differentiators for the SAP offering, according to both Bandlow and Forrester's Herbert, is its ability to integrate easily with MySAP ERP systems on the back end. Using product information found in the ERP system, a sales person can pull up manufacturing availability and pricing information and deliver a quote in real time online. Bandlow said while this completes the three major components of SAP CRM OnDemand, quarterly updates can be expected with the next update due in December. To date, the solution, like almost all on-demand solutions, is not industry-specific. But Bandlow said the company is looking at that and will respond to customer demand.
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The world's leading provider of business software, SAP, said Wednesday it expected sustained growth this year following a 3.0-percent rise in net profit in 2007.
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Siebel (Nasdaq: SEBL) topped expectations in its  third-quarter earnings results, registering a profit, higher sales and an increase in software-license revenue from the previous quarter.
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Business software maker Siebel Systems Inc. (SEBL.O: Quote, Profile, Research) on Monday said third-quarter revenue would beat Wall Street estimates, driven by a rebound in licensing
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(InfoWorld) - New software licensing revenue growth -- the highest inÂ 10 years for the company -- helped boost Oracle's first-quarter financials. New software licensing revenue grew 35 percent to $1.1 billion, the strongest growth of any quarter in the past decade, the company reported on Thursday. Revenue for the period ending Aug. 31 was up 26 percent to$4.5 billion and net income grew by 25 percent to $840 million compared to the same quarter last year, based on generally accepted accounting principles. Earnings per share grew 28 percent to $0.16. Applications' new license revenues helped drive growth, increasing by 65 percent over the corresponding period last year. Database and middleware new license revenue was up 23 percent, the highest growth rate in seven years for Oracle, the company reported. Oracle released a major upgrade to its database software during the quarter, helping to drive that increase. The company had 35,000 downloads of the software during the first month it was available. Oracle's results significantly beat some analyst expectations, including those of Citi Investment Research. Citi expected 20 percent growth in overall new software licensing, 15 percent growth in database and middleware license revenue, and just 33 percent in applications. While database software is the historical focus for Oracle, the company is now hoping to become a dominant player in its two other lines of business: applications and middleware. Oracle figures it is number three in the middleware market, behind Microsoft and IBM. If Oracle and IBM continue to grow at their current rates, Oracle could pass IBM at the end of this year or early next year, Larry Ellison, CEO of Oracle, said during a conference call to discuss the earnings. In applications, Oracle is behind market leader SAP. The companies have different strategies for growth with Oracle trying to sell to its existing large company customers and SAP chasing small businesses, he said. "While we think the small business market is interesting because it's large; we just haven't figured out a way to make a substantial profit in that market," he said. Oracle would have to build a new sales force, products, marketing, and advertising efforts in order to address the market, which doesn't promise strong revenue, he said. Oracle's applications business, with its continued focus on existing customers, has the potential for huge growth in the future, he said. "We're just at the very beginning in terms of penetrating this market," Ellison said. The business includes products that Oracle sells to companies like telecommunications operators. Those companies typically use custom software, some of which they may have installed as long as ten years ago, said Charles Phillips, president of Oracle. So part of Oracle's challenge is to convince these companies that off-the-shelf software from Oracle can work, he said. For the current quarter, Oracle expects new software license revenue to grow 15 percent to 25 percent from a year earlier and total revenue to grow 19 percent to 21 percent. Earnings per share this quarter should be $0.20 to $0.21, up from $0.18 for the corresponding period last year, Oracle said. This story was updated on September 20, 2007
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Oracle Corp.  on Thursday  posted a higher quarterly profit, helped by  stronger-than-expected new software license revenue.
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FRANKFURT SAP, Europe&#39;s biggest software maker, on Thursday posted a 15 percent rise in third-quarter net profit, citing higher global sales.
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PeopleSoft Inc. PSFT.O on Monday  forecast third-quarter revenue would exceed Wall Street  expectations, helped by an increase in customers making larger  orders for its business software.
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Siebel Systems's software license revenue in its just-ended third quarter rose from the grim five-year low hit in Siebel's second quarter, but still fell short of revenue recorded during the same period last year, the company said Tuesday.
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Oracle Corp.  on Monday posted a 21 percent rise in quarterly profit, helped by sales of business software licenses to the customers of acquired rivals like Siebel Systems and PeopleSoft.
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By Frank Norton, The News & Observer, Raleigh, N.C.  Feb. 14--SAS reported Tuesday that revenue rose 12 percent last year, hitting $1.9 billion as more retailers, banks and other businesses bought the Cary company's data-gathering and analysis software.