In a keynote that blended interactive audience participation, customer conversations, and product announcements, SAP executives and customers took to the SAP Sapphire stage on Wednesday to showcase how cloud computing and artificial intelligence (AI) are reshaping global business.
Newly unveiled innovations and partnerships revolutionize the way work gets done
With the evolving SAP Services and Support portfolio, SAP executives also showcased a new approach to engaging with customers. The message was clear: transformation is no longer optional — it’s survival.
Building on this theme, Thomas Saueressig, Member of the Executive Board of SAP SE, Customer Services & Delivery, emphasized how SAP stands by its customers as an indispensable partner in today’s volatile environment marked by shifting tariffs, global uncertainties, and an accelerating pace of change. “We understand that our customers seek faster transformations, faster time to value, and increased agility,” Saueressig said, adding that SAP is committed to supporting them at every step of the way.
Using RISE with SAP, the company’s transformation-as-a-service offering, and the power of the Business Transformation Management portfolio, SAP can already deliver up to 30 percent cost savings for its customers, and this is more important than ever when budgets are under pressure and organizations need to transform quickly. “But we don’t stop there,” Saueressig said, announcing a further evolution of the RISE with SAP Methodology, with updates to the discovery phase, a project workspace in SAP Cloud ALM, as well as a new transformation preparation service, including tailored transformation road maps for SAP customers.
SAP SuccessFactors has once again been recognized as a Leader in the IDC MarketScape: Worldwide Talent Acquisition 2025 Vendor Assessment (doc #US53236625, March 2025). SAP SuccessFactors was previously named a Leader in the IDC MarketScape: Worldwide Modern Talent Acquisition Suites 2022 Vendor Assessment (doc #US48357022, June 2022).
In today’s fast-changing world of work, hiring the right talent has never been more critical—or complex. HR and talent acquisition leaders are under growing pressure to deliver fast results, navigate rising uncertainty, and keep up with rapidly evolving skills needs in their business.
According to the World Economic Forum’s Future of Jobs Report 2025, 63% of employers cite skills gaps in the labor market as the primary barrier to business transformation, while 86% expect AI to significantly transform their business over the next five years. The study also reports that talent availability is declining, making it harder for organizations to find the right talent with the right capabilities needed for the future. At the same time, organizations are rethinking their approaches to hiring, embracing AI and moving toward more agile, skills-based strategies to compete for talent in a dynamic and evolving job market.
That’s why selecting the right technology partner matters now more than ever. Organizations need a solution that can help them stay ahead of change, drive smarter hiring, and fuel growth and long-term business success. “Talent acquisition priorities are changing, leading to evolving concentrations and points of entry in an increasingly diversifying vendor space in the market,” says Zachary Chertok, senior research manager, Employee Experience at IDC. “Increased pressures to reduce the time to place qualified talent in roles that fill persistent and evolving skills gaps are leading talent acquisition buyers to rethink their approaches to hiring and the tools that support them.”
SAP SuccessFactors is proud to be named a Leader in the IDC MarketScape: Worldwide Talent Acquisition 2025 Vendor Assessment. SAP SuccessFactors solutions can empower organizations of all sizes to address the ever-changing challenges of hiring in today’s complex, skills-driven world of work.
IDC MarketScape: Worldwide Talent Acquisition 2025 Vendor Assessment by Zachary Chertok, March 2025, IDC # US53236625.
IDC MarketScape vendor analysis model is designed to provide an overview of the competitive fitness of ICT suppliers in a given market. The research methodology utilizes a rigorous scoring methodology based on both qualitative and quantitative criteria that results in a single graphical illustration of each vendor’s position within a given market. The Capabilities score measures vendor product, go-to-market, and business execution in the short-term. The Strategy score measures alignment of vendor strategies with customer requirements in a 3-to-5-year timeframe. Vendor market share is represented by the size of the circles. Vendor year-over-year growth rate relative to the given market is indicated by a plus, neutral, or minus next to the vendor name.
The report analyzes the expansive talent acquisition ecosystem, evaluating 22 vendors for user experience, native solution capabilities, future development pipelines, and company criteria, including size, scope, geographic reach, and future growth targets. We believe SAP SuccessFactors’ position as a Leader reflects visionary product strategy, continuous innovation, comprehensive solution functionality, and demonstrated customer value and satisfaction. The IDC MarketScape states, “SAP SuccessFactors Recruiting is part of the SAP SuccessFactors HCM suite and provides AI-enabled tools, resources, and services to support recruiters and talent teams to source and align talent to their best-fit connection points within the organization.” Highlighting SAP SuccessFactors’ strengths, the report mentions, “SAP SuccessFactors customers find that the solution provides them with deep insights drawn from across the existing and modeled workforce. SAP SuccessFactors’ AI and analytical capabilities support clients to tie candidate-centric hiring practices into the evolving and modeled skilling and position needs of the organization.”
Helping companies hire smarter and faster
Hiring today isn’t just about filling open roles. It’s about building strong talent pipelines, finding people with the right skills and potential, creating exceptional candidate experiences, and aligning every hire to overall HR and business goals. SAP SuccessFactors Recruiting and SAP SuccessFactors Onboarding offer comprehensive, AI-enabled solutions that can simplify global hiring to help organizations attract, engage, and hire top talent with the right skills needed today and in the future.
The IDC MarketScape notes, “SAP SuccessFactors Recruiting helps recruiters maintain fluid and flexible organizational talent pipelines that retain and progressively match high-performing talent to where they are best fit within the evolving organization.” The report continues, “Overall, recruiters and talent acquisition teams find that SAP SuccessFactors’ recruiting and talent acquisition capabilities are feature rich, support dynamic and evolving compliance and sourcing needs, and support custom and AI-informed workflows and candidate progression.” SAP SuccessFactors solutions can enable organizations to accelerate hiring with AI-enabled talent acquisition capabilities, including AI-enhanced job descriptions, AI-assisted applicant screening, AI-recommended interview questions, AI-driven skills-based job recommendations, AI-assisted onboarding and offboarding, AI-assisted writing, and AI-driven interview summarization.
Attract and hire the best talent with a single, AI-enabled solution
Adopting the right AI-enabled talent acquisition strategy is what puts innovative businesses ahead. Darussalam Assets, a large and diversified holding company in Brunei turned to SAP SuccessFactors solutions to transform HR’s impact on its business, increasing productivity and efficiency to over 30 subsidiaries across 14 industries. “With SAP Business AI technology embedded in SAP SuccessFactors solutions, we’ve seen significant benefits such as reducing our overall recruitment time from months to weeks. The AI features have streamlined processes for generating and updating job descriptions and creating competency-based interview questions, making our recruitment process more efficient and standardized,” shares Salehin Basir, human capital development manager at Darussalam Assets. The company has seen significant benefits, such as four-times more efficient hiring processes, a 75% reduction in recruitment time, and deeper insights into important HR metrics that improve data-driven decision-making and reduce bottlenecks.
Powering a skills-based, AI-driven talent strategy
With a talent landscape defined by continuous change, the future of hiring relies on taking a skills-based approach to identifying, securing, and growing the right talent. The World Economic Forum reports that 70% of organizations plan to hire for emerging, in-demand skills, while 51% intend to reskill or upskill existing employees to fill growing skills needs. Whether an organization is focused on developing talent from within or bringing in new capabilities to keep their business ahead, SAP SuccessFactors solutions can help talent teams stay agile, efficient, and aligned to business needs.
According to trusted HCM Industry Analyst Josh Bersin’s Emerging Trends in Talent Acquisition for 2025 factbook, talent acquisition leaders state a growing priority to implement skills throughout their talent functions and strategies—for both hiring and internal mobility. The factbook shares, “AI plays a key role in deploying skills in a scalable and sustainable way, particularly as in-demand and job-specific skills are constantly changing. It can help match skills to jobs, identify skill adjacencies, pinpoint where talent with specific skills is located, uncover learning opportunities, and more.”
Our latest HR trends research finds growing workforce confidence around the potential value of AI, with 70% of managers agreeing that using AI technology for skills-based decision-making would be somewhat or very valuable, and an overwhelming majority of employees (88%) feeling positively about skills-based decision-making. The IDC MarketScape highlights how SAP SuccessFactors users can quickly see value from implementing skills-based hiring strategies, noting: “Simplified application processes help candidates apply from any device and leverage AI to parse skills from their resumes to match those with the company’s evolving skills architecture and talent intelligence.”
Bringing these insights to life, Capgemini is a powerful example of how leading organizations are building skills-based talent strategies ready for the future. Capgemini, a global business and technology partner with 340,000 employees across more than 50 countries turned to SAP SuccessFactors solutions when looking for an HR infrastructure that would allow it to attract, retain, and grow market-leading skills. Capgemini built a skills engine to support the moments that matter across the employee lifecycle, including recruitment, onboarding, talent management, compensation and rewards, learning, and succession management. The company is implementing SAP SuccessFactors HCM to enable skills-based people management and deliver a highly engaging people experience.
Going beyond talent acquisition, SAP SuccessFactors solutions help align hiring to overall HR strategies, with connected, unified learning and talent solutions; a single skills foundation; AI-enabled talent intelligence; and advanced, cross-suite capabilities. The IDC MarketScape notes, “SAP SuccessFactors Recruiting is a natural extension of the SAP SuccessFactors environment that gives companies a fully integrated platform for insights-driven, end-to-end candidate and employee lifecycle management.” The assessment further notes, “Talent acquisition teams can benefit from deep continuous workforce planning insights that guide for and optimize the balance between internal mobility and external hiring for a higher efficacy in talent placement.”
WALLDORF— The Supervisory Board of SAP SE (NYSE: SAP) today announced that it has further extended the contract of Christian Klein, CEO and chairman of the Executive Board. Initially set for three years starting in May 2025, the contract has now been extended to five years, continuing until April 2030.
The Supervisory Board has also extended the contract of Dominik Asam, CFO and member of the Executive Board, at his own request for two years to March 2028. These decisions ensure continuity and stability within the Executive Board, which as a leadership team collectively oversees the successful execution of SAP’s long-term strategy.
“Christian Klein and Dominik Asam, together with the executive team, have played an instrumental role in SAP’s ongoing success, providing steady leadership throughout the company’s transformation journey,” said Pekka Ala-Pietilä, Chairman of the Supervisory Board of SAP SE. “On behalf of the Supervisory Board, I thank them all for their contributions to strengthening SAP’s position as a global leader in enterprise technology.”
Klein (45) started his career at SAP in 1999 as a student. After holding various positions across the company, including Chief Financial Officer of SAP SuccessFactors and SAP’s Chief Controlling Officer, he was appointed Chief Operating Officer of SAP in 2016, a role in which he continued until 2021. Klein has been the sole CEO of SAP SE since 2020.
Prior to being appointed CFO of SAP in 2023, Asam (56) had served as CFO at Airbus SE from April 2019 to February 2023 and Infineon Technologies AG from 2011. In 2010, he was Head of Group Controlling at RWE AG. From 2005 to 2010, he held various roles at Siemens AG, including CEO of Siemens Financial Services and Corporate Vice President and Treasurer.
WALLDORF — SAP SE today announced its financial results for the first quarter ended March 31, 2025.
Current cloud backlog of €18.2 billion, up 28% and up 29% at constant currencies
Cloud revenue up 27% and up 26% at constant currencies
Cloud ERP Suite revenue up 34% and up 33% at constant currencies
Total revenue up 12% and up 11% at constant currencies
IFRS operating profit of €2.3 billion; non-IFRS operating profit of €2.5 billion, up 60% and up 58% at constant currencies
“Q1 once again underlines that our success formula is working. Current cloud backlog expanded 29% at constant currencies and total revenue saw a double-digit increase. With a share of more predictable revenue of 86%, SAP’s business model remains resilient in uncertain times. Our AI-powered portfolio enables companies to navigate supply chain disruptions in over 130 countries and to unlock efficiencies with agility and speed.”
Christian Klein, CEO
“Q1 marks a solid start to the year in a highly volatile environment, with strong total revenue growth and outstanding operating profit expansion. These results are a testament to our cost discipline and focused execution. While we’re encouraged by this momentum, we remain mindful of the broader environment and are approaching the rest of the year with vigilance, continuing to safeguard both profit and cash flow. “
