SAP Q1 Result Annoncement , Some interesting excerpts:

Leo Apotheker: The environment remains unchanged as pricing is still very competitive. As you can see by the results for the quarter, customers however are buying software, meaning that the demand is there but buying decisions continue to be made prudently.

In the midst of all of this, we continued to win a large majority of the competitive deals. We won 78% in the first quarter against our next largest competitor. This demonstrates the superiority of our products, our technology and our people, and the strong acceptance of the transparent product roadmap and vision we continue to provide to our customers. Our customers are making a very clear choice on who they trust as their software solution partner.

Another success continues to be our safe passage program. We have signed up a total of 544 customers through safe passage. This represents a 121% increase compared to the first quarter of last year. Some key safe passage wins in the first quarter include Alaska Milk Corporation, bobst SA and INFRA S.A.

In the first quarter, order entry in the pipeline remained strong and the number of new contracts signed increased 15% year over year. The share of new customers based on order entry was 24%, but as we continue to sign more deals with mid-market customers, it is also important to talk about the share of new customers based on number of contracts, which was 31%.

For the mid-market, which we define as companies with less than $1 billion in revenue, or less than 2,500 employees, we reported that for the first quarter of 2007, on a rolling four quarter basis, 31% of order entry came from this segment.

Let's now take a look at the regional performance. We reported double-digit growth rates in each region based on software and software-related service revenues at constant currencies. The [inaudible] countries also performed extremely well, with strong double-digit growth rates in most of these countries.

Software and software-related service revenues in EMEA were up 10% at constant currencies, Germany reported growth of 4%, while the rest of EMEA was up 14% at constant currencies. Based on software revenues at constant currencies, EMEA was up 9%. Superior performances came from the U.K. and Switzerland.

Key contract wins in the EMEA region were Service Birmingham Limited, Deutsche Lufthansa AG, and Grundfos Management A/S in Denmark.

Henning Kagerman:  Let me now take a brief moment to comment on the recent lawsuit filed by Oracle against SAP. SAP has a long legacy as a company with an unparalleled reputation as a trusted advisor and highly regarded partner with its ecosystem of customers, partners, shareholders and employees. SAP believe in the importance of intellectual property rights. As we have stated before, we will aggressively defend against the claims made in this lawsuit.

SAP and TomorrowNow are actively engaged in legitimate competition by providing high quality third-party enterprise software maintenance and support services for customers running [GDNetworks], PeopleSoft, and [Barn] applications who have reached the end of standard maintenance under their contracts with Oracle. TomorrowNow's business success is all about customer choice. This lawsuit demonstrates that Oracle is trying to limit customer choices by trying to discredit their competition.

Two emerging products that I want to mention briefly are our corporate performance management and governance and risk compliance solutions. These two products, along with others are geared to penetrate the business user, a large potential universe of new users for SAP inside and outside of our installed base.We have been quite successful to date with our corporate performance management solutions and have augmented our functionality with the recent acquisition of Pilot Software. Governance, risk and compliance, or GRC, has also become a topic receiving a lot of attention. Our GRC suite has expanded well beyond our 2006 acquisition of Versa and includes access controls, process controls, risk management, GTS and emission management.

Our A1S product launch is not a traditional one with a big bang introduction. Our new mid-market product comes with a complete new business model and a new go-to-market approach. Therefore, a phased product launch is required. We are currently seeking comprehensive customer and partner feedback that we will incorporate into our new mid-market solution. This includes feedback regarding service and support on demand functionality, consulting requirements, and embedded learning. We are on track for bringing this product to market and expect its volume ready at the beginning of 2008.

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Prashanth Rai