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SAP SE (SAP)

Q4 2016 Earnings Call· Tue, Jan 24, 2017

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Transcript

Operator

Operator

Ladies and gentlemen, thank you for standing by. My name is Emma, your Chorus Call operator. Welcome and thank you for joining SAP Fourth Quarter and Full Year Results 2016 Conference Call. Throughout today’s recorded presentation, all participants will be in a listen-only mode. The presentation will be followed by a question-and-answer session. [Operator Instructions] I would now like to turn the conference over to Mr. Stefan Gruber. Please go ahead, sir.

Stefan Gruber

Analyst · Chandramouli Sriraman of MainFirst Bank. Please go ahead

Yes, thank you. Good morning or good afternoon. This is Stefan Gruber, Head of Investor Relations. Thank you all for joining us to discuss our results for the fourth quarter and full year 2016. I’m joined by our CEO, Bill McDermott; and Luka Mucic, our CFO, who will both make opening remarks on the call today. Also joining us for Q&A are board members Rob Enslin, who runs Global Customer Operations; Bernd Leukert, who leads Products & Innovation; and Steve Singh, Head of SAP Business Networks and Applications. Before we get started, as usual, I would like to say a few words about forward-looking statements and our use of non-IFRS financial measures. Any statements made during this call that are not historical facts are forward-looking statements as defined in the U.S. Private Securities Litigation Reform Act of 1995. Words such as anticipate, believe, estimate, expect, forecast, intend, may, plan, project, predict, should, outlook and will, and similar expressions as they relate to SAP are intended to identify such forward-looking statements. SAP undertakes no obligation to publicly update or revise any forward-looking statements. All forward-looking statements are subject to various risks and uncertainties that could cause actual results to differ materially from expectations. The factors that could affect SAP’s future financial results are discussed more fully in SEC’s filings with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission, including SAP’s Annual Report on Form 20-F for 2015 filed with the SEC on March 29, 2016. Participants of this call are cautioned not to place undue reliance on these forward-looking statements, which speak only as of their dates. On our investor relations website, you can find our earnings press release also known as the quarterly statement and financial summary slides deck which are intended to supplement our prepared remarks today and include reconciliation from our non-IFRS numbers to IFRS numbers. Unless otherwise noted, all financial numbers referred to on this conference call are non-IFRS and growth rates are non-IFRS at constant currencies. The non-IFRS financial measures we provide should not be considered as a substitute for or superior to the matters of financial performance prepared in accordance with IFRS. And finally, I’d like to note that we would like to welcome you back to our Annual Capital Markets Day again in New York City on February 9, 2017. We will give you more detail about the innovation growth drivers behind our 2020 ambitions. With that, I hand the call over to our CEO, Bill McDermott.

Bill McDermott

Analyst · Morgan Stanley. Please go ahead

Thank you very much, Stefan, and hello everyone. Thank you very much for joining us today. Looking back in 2010, we set a clear strategy to increase our lead in the business software industry. We fundamentally reinvented the database with SAP HANA which has now become the de facto in memory platform for the enterprise. We created the future of ERP with S/4HANA, a generational upgrade cycle that has only just begun. We conducted the smartest M&A in the industry, adding best-in-class cloud companies to the SAP portfolio and extracted enormous value from those assets. In 2016, we once again validated the SAP strategy by reaching all of our raised guidance metrics. We again delivered strong software sales, fast cloud growth, and operating income expansion. Cloud revenue powered to 31% growth and this is on par or better than best of breed standalone cloud companies. Cloud and software grew 8%, significantly outpacing our main competitor. IFRS operating profit was up 20%, while non-IFRS operating profit expanded to a record €6.6 billion. New cloud bookings surged nearly 40% in Q4 and 31% in the full year. It’s now a €3 billion cloud business, growing more than 30% that we have here at SAP. Our cloud backlog surged 47% to €5.4 billion, greatly enhancing the predictability of our future cloud revenue. The facts clearly demonstrate that our strategy has delivered for the shareholders of SAP. Since 2009, we have more than doubled the revenue, operating income, and the market cap of SAP. We are proud to be the most valuable backs [ph] company, and we’re only getting started. We are growing in every region of the world with the pipeline that has never been stronger. We are focused on profitable revenue growth, laser focused. As part of our 2020 profit acceleration, SAP…

Luka Mucic

Analyst · Morgan Stanley. Please go ahead

Thank you very much, Bill and welcome from my side as well. Now, looking at our strong results, I’m really proud to say that we delivered as we promised we would. In fact, we met all guidance metrics for the full year 2016 as refined in October. SAP once again showed impressive resilience in uncertain times. For example, even in light of Brexit, the UK had excellent results; China performed tremendously amidst continued macroeconomic uncertainty; and we overcame political volatility in Mexico with strong results, Mexico had double-digit software revenue growth. I’m also happy to announce that our cash flow increased significantly by €1 billion in 2016, based on a stellar Q4 with more than 150% growth, even outpacing a strong Q3. At the same time, we are successfully progressing towards a more predictable business model, based on a very strong cloud and growing core business. Our share of more predictable revenue is now 61% for the full year, up 2 percentage points. This gives us more stability in the volatile fast moving market. So, let’s take a look at the top line performance and start with our cloud business where we have grown by more than 30% for four years in a row now. This continued fast growth is fueled by our future committed cloud revenue or new cloud bookings. We grew by 31% in fiscal year 2016. This resulted in €3.01 billion in cloud revenue at constant currency, achieving a refined guidance range of €3 billion to €3.05 billion. With this continued strong growth in cloud, we have now increased the share of total revenue by another 3 percentage points in 2016 to 14%. For the full year, our new cloud bookings were also strong with growth of 31% to €1.15 billion. And as expected, in Q4, we…

Stefan Gruber

Analyst · Chandramouli Sriraman of MainFirst Bank. Please go ahead

Thank you, Luka. I hand it back to the operator. Please start the Q&A session now.

Operator

Operator

[Operator Instructions] The first question comes from the line of Adam Wood of Morgan Stanley. Please go ahead.

Adam Wood

Analyst · Morgan Stanley. Please go ahead

Hi. Good afternoon, Bill, Luka, thanks very much for taking the questions. Couple, if I could. First of all, on the operating profit outlook and the margin outlook. Clearly the Company is investing for growth at the moment, and that’s paying off on the topline. I wonder if you could help us whether there were any kind of one-off spending in Q4 that pushed the expenses up? And as we look into 2018, what are the investments that are going into 2017 in terms of the HANA move on the cloud, in terms of how you expect to move to subscription payments to happen that depresses 2017 but then turns around in 2018 to give you the confidence that we see the operating leverage coming through in the later of the guidance? And then, maybe just very quickly on the technology side. I think, Bill, this is the first time you’ve talked in a little bit more detail about machine learning. We’ve seen other companies focus on the vertical side as well as horizontal. Could you give us a little bit of feel of what’s going on with SAP and how much of that can be organic versus M&A driven? Thank you.

Luka Mucic

Analyst · Morgan Stanley. Please go ahead

Should I start maybe with questions on the investment side? So, I wouldn’t say that there were any -- let’s say truly extraordinary new types of investments that we made in Q4, but we continued to invest in the key areas in which we said that we would focus on. So, clearly, also in Q4, we continued to invest in the build out of our convert [ph] cloud infrastructure, into our program to migrate our acquired cloud assets on to our HANA in-memory database, we continued to invest data center consolidation. This will continue also in 2017. But as we always have said 2017 is the year where these, let’s say, extraordinary investment in our cloud delivery business will come to an end. And then as of 2018, we expect to see the leverage from these efficiency-based investments in a much higher progression of the cloud gross margins and consequently also the operating income contribution of our cloud business. In terms of the headcount growth, we continued to invest also in Q4. However, from a profile perspective, slightly different; we hired a bit over 1,700 FTEs in Q4. In Q3, we had a very strong focus in hiring on the sales and marketing side, because you want to bring these people on board and train them so that they can get fully productive as quickly as possible in the New Year. Therefore, in Q4, while we still did some additional hiring in sales and marketing, this was not the leading category; most of the hiring that we did in Q4 was in the R&D and the new cloud delivery operations where obviously you’re trying to build up a more even basis of your headcount distribution as you progress through the year. In terms of the profile of investments in total, you’re absolutely correct. 2017 will be another year of investment whereas in the years 2018 and going forward, we expect that most of the cost ratios, except for sales and marketing where we will continue to invest in line with our growth potentials, will come down as a relative share of revenues. So, we expect that then cloud delivery operations will be more, let’s say, steady progression with growing leverage from the top line in the cloud, we also believe that in R&D after heavy investments into the build out of S/4 and our innovation categories, the R&D ratio will start to slightly decline. And hence, we expect to see a bigger CAGR in operating income in the years 2018 and moving forward, so far from my side on the investment and operating income side.

Bill McDermott

Analyst · Morgan Stanley. Please go ahead

Thank you, Luka. And Adam, I’ll just touch on the machine learning. First of all, we are working on largely horizontal focused applications, core applications, and we are making our own. So, think of it as focused on the digital core and making the line of business smarter, so S/4HANA, our cloud and network assets, and it will be mainly organic. And if we do anything on the M&A side, it will be tuck-in, nothing to get concerned with -- on the financial model. And maybe, I could just give you a little feel for this. We need to start turning up the advertising and the marketing on what we’re already doing for machine learning, whether it is recruiting, employee approvals, payment processing, sales discounting approval or call center management up to an including effectively using box. We already have our machine learning solutions in place and we’re rolling them out across industry. It will be a huge source of growth and probably not factored in your models. In terms of blockchain, it’s another area that I’ll just touch on because I know we talked a lot about IoT, but not so much ML and blockchain. If you think about banking, identity, compliance security, trade settlement, insurance, smart claims, manufacturing, track and trace, all these industries have a blockchain case. And remember, more than three quarters of the world transactions are running through an SAP system. So, our financials will actually form a very unique blockchain business network. I kindly ask you to keep that in mind. And then, finally, on IoT because it is real time information, logistics, autonomous payments, quality assurance, and the counterfeiting industrial and military cyber security, we’re in all of these areas at the application layer, and we have it now. So, it’s not like a fantasy or dream or we give you a tool box and you build it. Our great development team is already building it or has built it and is rolling out in customer establishment and maybe step on at the investor day, we can give you a complete overview including all the logos; we’re in flight already.

Operator

Operator

Next question comes from the line of Chandramouli Sriraman of MainFirst Bank. Please go ahead.

Chandramouli Sriraman

Analyst · Chandramouli Sriraman of MainFirst Bank. Please go ahead

Hi. Thanks for taking my question and congrats on a good 2016. Just a couple from my side. So, you raised the midpoint of your guidance by about €1.4 billion in revenues out of which 0.5 comes from the cloud. Given that services is not a big mover in terms of overall topline, I was just wondering is this reasonable to assume that a big chunk of this guidance comes from licenses given that maintenance is predictable. Is it fair to sort of back calculate the impact licenses? Could help us go through the various moving parts that will helpful. And my second question is Rob usually gives the number of live S/4HANA customer. I was just wondering if you could have that number. And also any comment on your S/4HANA public cloud plans would be very helpful. Thanks.

Bill McDermott

Analyst · Chandramouli Sriraman of MainFirst Bank. Please go ahead

Yes. Let me start maybe on the 2020 ambition and then I’ll pass on to Rob for the other questions also on S/4HANA cloud. On the 2020 ambition raise on the topline, you are right. Of course, when we devised the 2020 ambition, we were at the very beginning of introducing S/4HANA to the market. And hence, we had an aspiration for our core business that we’re still expecting declines and extending up to 2020 to more significant single-digit declines. Now, we see that in last two years, we have been doing substantially better than that due to introduction of S/4HANA which has brought licenses back into positive growth territory in both 2015 and 2016. And so, we don’t expect anymore that there would be a substantial downturn in our core business, but that it rather can sustain the approximate levels that we are seeing right now and that of course then leads to our total revenue aspiration to also be higher than originally expected.

Rob Enslin

Analyst · Chandramouli Sriraman of MainFirst Bank. Please go ahead

Absolutely. And the question on S/4HANA in the public multitenant cloud, we at Investor Day on February 9th will feature this business prominently. We have a leader named Darren Roos, who is running this for us on an end-to-end basis. We have -- think of it as a division going to market with S/4HANA public cloud multitenant and we’ll go on for fence this year. We’ve got an unbelievable solution. We had a big Q4, and it’s obviously subscription revenue. And Bernd, maybe, you want to add a little bit of color.

Bernd Leukert

Analyst · Chandramouli Sriraman of MainFirst Bank. Please go ahead

I think what we observe in the market that while the beginning of the cloud was clearly driven by individual line of business solutions, we now see that it’s a time where ERP moves to the cloud. And it’s great that we have anticipated that move early, while we can play both choices. If the customer wants to move the entire -- I’m talking the entire ERP as a SaaS solution with multi-tenancy capability, we have in our portfolio. And as Bill said, we will talk big about that at the Capital Markets Day. But I can refer to that we saw that uptake for the first time in history already starting very strong in Q4. I can reference one customer who went live after the first conversation after seven weeks, which is the beauty of the cloud. So, this ease of consumption with the entire ERP is paying off, and we have ambitious goals for 2017.

Stefan Gruber

Analyst · Chandramouli Sriraman of MainFirst Bank. Please go ahead

Okay. Thank you. Let’s move to next…

Rob Enslin

Analyst · Chandramouli Sriraman of MainFirst Bank. Please go ahead

[Multiple Speakers] customers productive on S/4HANA.

Stefan Gruber

Analyst · Chandramouli Sriraman of MainFirst Bank. Please go ahead

Thank you, Rob. Let’s move to next question, please.

Operator

Operator

Your next question comes from the line of John King of Bank of America Merrill Lynch. Please go ahead.

John King

Analyst · John King of Bank of America Merrill Lynch. Please go ahead

Good afternoon and thank you for taking the questions. I think three, probably mainly for Luka. But firstly, following up on the S/4 cloud side of things; obviously you’re just starting I guess to push particularly around the core ERP. Are you factoring any significant amounts of the core ERP deals shifting from license to subscription in 2017 or is it still quite a small number? Just help us out with how we should be thinking about the license trajectory through the course of the year. And a couple of follow-ups around the margin. Could you help us quantify what the cloud migration projects at the moment are costing you on the margin side and also maybe the customer co-innovation projects, how much of a drag that’s creating? And finally, on the cash flow side, obviously very good progress in 2016. How does that look for 2017; is there any priorities around CapEx that you might need to invest in related to the cloud projects which might hold that back?

Luka Mucic

Analyst · John King of Bank of America Merrill Lynch. Please go ahead

Yes. So, let me start. First of all on the S/4 cloud, you’re right; we will start to broadly penetrate the right segment of the market with S/4 public cloud. This is a solution that is primarily geared towards the upper mid market and lower LE space where I think it will be quite attractive and will help as well to spur further growth in the cloud. But the expectation for shift from license subscription from that end are really moderate and by any means or any way factored into the overarching guidance that we have provided. The second point on consulting and the scope of core innovation projects and their impact on the cloud margin, it’s actually not insignificant; it’s an impact of roundabout 5 percentage points towards the margins. Now, you will always have some level of these core innovation projects because these are of necessary to continue and to use best practices from customers and build them into our solution portfolio. However, the overall size of those engagements in 2016 has clearly been above the normal I would say. So, we certainly expect that this will be one of the key factors to improve our service profitability in 2017 when these projects are running out as planned next year. Then on the 2017 CapEx and cash flow progression, we generally believe that our cash flow development will continue to follow our strong top line progression that we are planning for. Of course in 2016 and the year-over-year comparison, we had an extraordinary effect that we had huge restructuring related cash outflows in 2015 in the second half of the year that we simply did not have in 2016, that’s why we have the huge growth. So we will certainly to see triple digit growth in the cash…

Operator

Operator

The next question comes from the line of Walter Pritchard of Citi. Please go ahead.

Walter Pritchard

Analyst · Walter Pritchard of Citi. Please go ahead

Thank you. Luka, I am wondering if you could talk about in the guidance, you sort of alluded to stability in the quarter and you’ve gotten through the last two years with stable license. And I know you have S/4 public cloud that’s going to ramp up here. But if you think about the factors that would still drive your license down say in the low single digits, mid single digits as you’ve guided to over the next four years, what would be those factors and how should we look at sort of their relative potential to swing that license number?

Luka Mucic

Analyst · Walter Pritchard of Citi. Please go ahead

Yes. I think it would primarily be continued progression in the transformation of our line of business solutions to the cloud. So, we still have a moderate level of license sales of additional seats in for example on-premise HR, in on-premise procurement, in on-premise customer relationship management over time. These customers will certainly migrate with us to our respective cloud solutions and that will continue to have a certain dragging effect on licenses. On the flip side, of course, our flagship solution S/4HANA, but also quite frankly elements of our on-premise portfolio around omni-channel ecommerce, Hybris for example, will continue to grow. And to what extent this will level out against each other is of course very hard to predict. I think over the course of the last two years, we gave a prudent and reasonable guidance around that. And so far, we are always able to meet it. So, we are very confident that for the next few years, we also have the risk and reward, and opportunity profile directionally right in this regard.

Bill McDermott

Analyst · Walter Pritchard of Citi. Please go ahead

And Walter, the one thing I would say adding to Luka’s comments is with S/4HANA, this is a generational market opportunity and thousands of customers will come from competitive platforms to S/4HANA and there will be a substantial number of them that could easily backfill some of the solutions that will migrate to the cloud versus running on-premise. So, we have a good feeling about what S/4HANA can do in all dimensions especially when you consider in the last quarter, I think it was about half net new names. And if I hear that half a net new names are coming in to the SAP portfolio with immense loyalty rates in the installed base, the cloud and the network clicking on all cylinders, it kind of makes me feel like the whole thing is tying together into one heck of a growth story.

Operator

Operator

The next question comes from the line of Philipp Winslow of Wells Fargo Securities. Please go ahead.

Philipp Winslow

Analyst · Philipp Winslow of Wells Fargo Securities. Please go ahead

Hi. Thanks, guys and congrats on a great end to what was obviously a very strong year, and it’s also good to be back covering you guys. Just two questions. First one for you Bill; Luka did a good job walking through the R&D investments and then obviously the investments on the COGS line in terms of just the forward guidance. But when you think about the go-to-market side and maybe Rob could also buzz in here too. You obviously have multiple drivers going right now; you’ve got license growing with S/4HANA; you’ve got the cloud business hitting some pretty key milestones; you surpassed work in terms of customer count from Employee Central Q3 and so forth. So, how are you sort of balancing that in the go-to-market, how do you feel about the headcount, the quotas, anything that you’re kind of changing I guess or how you’re thinking about it next year and over the next over the next couple of years would be great? And I just have one quick follow-up for Luka.

Bill McDermott

Analyst · Philipp Winslow of Wells Fargo Securities. Please go ahead

Sure. I’ll start and then hand it over to Rob. I think one of the things we are laser focused on is bringing people into the Company that can code software or sale software and creating immense learning and training opportunities for these people, so we can get them young at a university and build them in our own culture and our own image. It’s kind of dull, spending your time recruiting from other software companies and then having to reinvent people. We’d rather start fresh and do it right. The other thing I think is worth mentioning is we have actually built quite a competency in the go-to-market under leadership of Rob Enslin and also Steve Singh on the business network and the cloud side. And I really think we have immense maturity and leadership also with the cooperation of Bernd Leukert in the development side where we have some beautiful end-to-end businesses. So, we have this wonderful match, our regional coverage models to deal with the 193 countries in 25 distinctly different industries. But the way we’re going to market and crossing over on very significant cloud, network and end-to-businesses such as S/4HANA cloud which I mentioned a few minutes ago, I think really differentiates SAP. Most cultures can’t handle it because they don’t have a symphony in their culture, they have a war zone. So with regard to Rob, I’d like to turn it over to him because he is doing a great job and he told me as early as this morning how strong the pipe is. So, Rob, over to you.

Rob Enslin

Analyst · Philipp Winslow of Wells Fargo Securities. Please go ahead

Thank you, Bill. First of all, I think it starts with stable leadership, and we’ve had stable leadership in the go-to-market organization between Steve and myself for the last couple of years and that’s really paying dividends. Second piece is we continue to hire graduates out colleges and into one year of training, bring them into the field and then having a tremendous impact, and we’re talking significant numbers, that links into our culture. Third piece is our end-to-end model when it comes to analytics, database, SuccessFactors, customer engagement and commerce and Hybris, Ariba et cetera; that’s really working now together with the regional model. So, when you look at that model, it’s really seen right now and people really understand how to engage with customers and actually up sell customers. So, when you look at our significant customer base, what you see is an S/4 environment then connected with many, many SAP applications, Concur, Ariba Fieldglass et cetera. And then, lastly, I would say, we’re obviously investing in the go-to-market significantly under Darren’s leadership and we’ll share that at the Capital Markets Day. We see that as a significant opportunity and Q4 was actually very, very good for us in public cloud and the S/4. And then what I will tell you is significant growth opportunity as well in investing in the go-to-market in our eastern European marketplace, our APJ marketplace and our Latin American marketplace and using our global scale, we’ll see significant leverage as well there. And probably lastly, our productivity has increased in the go-to-market side for the last four years and we continue to see that happen.

Philipp Winslow

Analyst · Philipp Winslow of Wells Fargo Securities. Please go ahead

Great, thanks guys. And then there is a quick follow-up for Luka. Luka, you obviously gave guidance for 2017 in constant currency. There is clearly a lot of swings in currency very late in the year. So, I wonder if you can provide just more color on -- if currencies remain stable with where they are right now, just what you would expect the effect on the as reported numbers to be or maybe you’ll touch on that at Analyst Day?

Luka Mucic

Analyst · Philipp Winslow of Wells Fargo Securities. Please go ahead

No, that’s a very good question, and I am happy to answer it right away; it’s also an important one and we covered it also during the press conference earlier this morning. You are absolutely right. It’s a constant currency guidance. And as we know, currencies have moved not insubstantially through the course of 2016, actually the currency environment has been improved for SAP through the course of the year. And hence, if you were to assume that the currency exchange rates from the beginning of the year, so January 2nd would prevail, then, we would expect to see a positive tailwind impact on cloud and software revenue of 3% to 3.5% and on the operating profit from 3.5% to 4%. If we take the exchange rates from yesterday, then that effect would actually be approximately 2 percentage points of tailwind and for the cloud and software revenue, and about 2.5 percentage points for operating profit. So clearly, so far, we are in tailwind category. And that’s also something that applies when you take a look at how we have converted the previous midterm ambition from 2017 to a constant currency outlook right now. And if you reflect that on the change of the exchange rate environment from average 2015 rates, which obviously were underlying the previous ambition update in the beginning of 2016 to the average 2016 rate, we can actually see that there is even a slight headwind that we have been facing between then and now on the currency side. And so, I think also in light of this, one should see the ambition update and the raise as a very positive sign of confidence of SAP.

Operator

Operator

The next question comes from the line of Gerardus Vos of Barclays. Please go ahead.

Gerardus Vos

Analyst · Gerardus Vos of Barclays. Please go ahead

Hi, good afternoon, Bill and Luka, and congratulations on the strong Q4. Just a couple of questions, if I may, just first of all on the 2020 guidance, very encouraging upgrades; I’m just struggling to kind of bring the pieces together. Because if I listen that, we now expecting a flat license number. And if I look at the FX changes since 2015, it looks that there is an implied downgrade to the outlook unless my FX assumptions are wrong. So, it would be great, if you kind could help us a little bit around your kind of assumptions on FX and on the underlying thought for the kind of business. And then secondly, the tax rate ended up quite a lot low than where it was guided at the second quarter. Could you just provide us an update what you would expect for 2017? And then, finally, question for Bill on the industry, Oracle [ph] has had quite a bit of success driving that suite into the kind of mid-market and I guess that’s for S/4 and cloud is going to be pitched as well. Just could you let us when does this product go live and what would you expect from the kind of ramp in year one and year two? Thank you.

Luka Mucic

Analyst · Gerardus Vos of Barclays. Please go ahead

So, Gerardus, thanks for the questions. I’ll answer the first two. First of all on the 2020 ambition, let’s, just quickly on a few things. We are not necessarily assuming on an implied basis that licenses will remain stable all the way through 2020. However, we have become more positive around the overall scope of the license business. And so, where originally in the implied guidance we would have had a high single-digit decline in licenses, that’s what we don’t expect anymore. There is still an expectation of low to mid single-digit declines until 2020. And why are we guiding in that way implied, because when you put out an ambition that goes until 2020, which I think is something that is unprecedented in our industry that you won’t find by any other player, despite all of the confidence, you want to be safe and you want to be rock solid with this ambition and the same applies of course also to the other metrics like the operating income as well as the cloud revenue growth. Hence, you may characterize it as conservatism but it’s a guidance that we believe is readily achievable and that has been I would say a common theme that you have seen from SAP in the recent years that we are hitting, what we are promising to the market and the same will be true for these targets. And on the FX, actually what I said before and with regard to the 2017 outlook is true for 2020 obviously as well that the ambition update in 2016 where we left the 2020 targets unchanged has of course now run its course in an exchange rate environment in 2016 that was a mild headwind for SAP. So, the fact that we are now upgrading it and…

Bill McDermott

Analyst · Gerardus Vos of Barclays. Please go ahead

And Gerardus, what I’d like to also just give you an update on is the S/4 cloud; it’s here now and we’ve been selling it and it’s going extraordinarily well. So, I’ll Bernd and Rob take turns, giving you some color on that, but also I think it will be helpful for Steve Singh to just give you an update on business by design as well because you mentioned that others are doing well. It’s probably important that you have the whole story. Bernd?

Bernd Leukert

Analyst · Gerardus Vos of Barclays. Please go ahead

Yes. Maybe to start first what I was explaining before already is the acceleration and speed of adoption of the cloud is paying off now by the entire ERP. And we had seen that the first time the significant impact in Q4 thanks to Darren Roos leadership. In addition to that, we are heavily investing and that is probably of key interest for you, to bring down the cost operation by further automating our data center. So, it will be fully software driven, which is essentially going forward as well for our margin. And I hand over to Rob. Maybe, Rob, you can give more outlook on our target for sales.

Rob Enslin

Analyst · Gerardus Vos of Barclays. Please go ahead

Yes. Look, we saw it across a significant Q4 number of customers signing up for S/4 public cloud, multi-tenant, we see a significant amount of those customers going live, very productive, actually very, very satisfied high quality system. And we plan to broadcast live at the Capital Markets Day, we’re going to showcase those customers. I think what you’re going to find with those customers that have signed up for S/4 public cloud is that they are really cool; they do some innovative things and we’re doing really innovative things with them. And the time it took us to go big with S/4 cloud was I think really well handled by SAP because now what you see is the satisfaction on the solution is at an all time high and will allow us to elevate our gain and get scale really rapidly in 2017.

Bernd Leukert

Analyst · Gerardus Vos of Barclays. Please go ahead

Rob, maybe a closing comment on one of the deals we have won. If you compare the modern S/4 public cloud solution with NetSuite, I think many people forget that NetSuite is on the market for more than a decade. So, if somebody seems this as a modern ERP in the cloud, this is already -- was probably more than a decade ago and these days, a decade in the IT industry feels like a century. And we have observed that especially last quarter in many head-to-head competitions. So, the user experience is superior in S/4; the response time with our leading platform of HANA outpaces every transaction in NetSuite and as well the end-to-end processes we can support in our dedicated scope is more comprehensive than any other competitive product. So from that perspective, you’ll hear more positive news going forward.

Bill McDermott

Analyst · Gerardus Vos of Barclays. Please go ahead

Steve?

Steve Singh

Analyst · Gerardus Vos of Barclays. Please go ahead

Yes, I’ll add one thing to it real quick. I think if you look at SMB, obviously broad definition of it, but 1,500 [ph] employee companies. We have an exceptional distribution engine, which [indiscernible] distribution into that segment where a very large portion of the Concur growth in any given quarter comes out of SMB. We think [BYD] hasn’t been revamped over the past year but the opportunity to continue to drive BYD [ph] in that segment is very, very strong. We’ve seen results to that extent over the course of the past couple of quarters and we continue to run aggressively that opportunity. And by the way, when you think about the BYD, [ph] we’ll speak more to this at the Capital Markets Day. Think of it as not only a refresh in the technology stack but being opened up and integrated into Concur, Ariba Fieldglass, SuccessFactors and other products. We can deliver a full suite of services to our SMB customers that helps emerge [ph] our business.

Stefan Gruber

Analyst · Gerardus Vos of Barclays. Please go ahead

Thank you. I think given the time we have time for one final question.

Operator

Operator

Final question comes from the line of Keith Bachman at BMO. Please go ahead.

Keith Bachman

Analyst · BMO. Please go ahead

Hi. Many thanks for taking the question. I wanted to just ask about S/4HANA adoption. I think the number was set for what it was Q4, but I didn’t quite pick it up. But in addition, as you think about the 5,400 customers, what are you thinking about the conversion rate of those customers in 2017 that supports the license growth? It sounds more like flattish. And how are you thinking about that adoption trend, if you had to parse it between cloud and on-premise? Thank you.

Bill McDermott

Analyst · BMO. Please go ahead

Rob, do you want to talk about the actual S/4HANA adoption numbers you’ve previously quoted.

Rob Enslin

Analyst · BMO. Please go ahead

Yes, sure. So, we have 5,400 plus customers that are exclusive today. Today, there is over 550 that are productive in line across not only financials but logistics, generally it’s an extremely stable version of the solution. And expectation is that that number is going to grow significantly with the amount of projects that are ongoing which is probably closer to 2,500 projects right now that are ongoing around S/4. When it comes to looking at S/4 and on-premise or S/4 software and S/4 public cloud, I think Luka gave it in the numbers. We continue to see not only strong uptick on S/4 in general across the board but also in HANA as a standalone big data platform with Vora and Altiscale. So, as we see some diminishing returns as certain of these move to the cloud, we see very, very strong growth in S/4 and in HANA. And as Bill said earlier on, I feel really good about the pipeline moving into 2017.

Stefan Gruber

Analyst · BMO. Please go ahead

Very good, thank you very much. This concludes the financial analyst call for today. And we look forward to seeing you all in New York City on February 9th at our Capital Markets Day…

Bill McDermott

Analyst · BMO. Please go ahead

On IS. [Ph]

Stefan Gruber

Analyst · BMO. Please go ahead

Capital Markets Day on IS. [Ph] That’s the new brand I just announced. Thank you everybody for joining. And bye, bye.

Bill McDermott

Analyst · BMO. Please go ahead

Thanks everybody.

Operator

Operator

Ladies and gentlemen, this concludes the SAP fourth quarter and full year results 2016. Thank you for participating. You may now disconnect.