How Accurate Was SAP on Having a Billion Users by 2015?

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Executive Summary

For years SAP has said that that it would have 1 billion users by 2015.
In this article, we review the accuracy of this claim.

Introduction

SAP stated this as a goal, so one might say that it is not fair to declare this as a prediction. However, this goes to the unreasonableness of some of SAP’s statements. Bill McDermott stated that SAP was on track to have 1 billion users by 2015. It is unclear on what basis Bill McDermott made his estimation, however, we could not find any instance of SAP being fact checked and this claim was carried by IT media. You will find out how accurate SAP was in its claim of 1 billion users by 2015.

Our References

If you want to see our references for this article and other related Brightwork articles, see this link.

Notice of Lack of Financial Bias: We have no financial ties to SAP or any other entity mentioned in this article.

This is published by a research entity, not some lowbrow entity that is part of the SAP ecosystem.
Second, no one paid for this article to be written, and it is not pretending to inform you while being rigged to sell you software or consulting services. Unlike nearly every other article you will find from Google on this topic, it has had no input from any company's marketing or sales department. As you are reading this article, consider how rare this is. The vast majority of information on the Internet on SAP is provided by SAP, which is filled with false claims and sleazy consulting companies and SAP consultants who will tell any lie for personal benefit. Furthermore, SAP pays off all IT analysts -- who have the same concern for accuracy as SAP. Not one of these entities will disclose their pro-SAP financial bias to their readers.

The Reasonableness of this Goal

In 2015, there were 7.2 billion people on the planet. However, if you remove people who are not in the workforce, according to the World Bank, there were 3.44 billion employed people in 2015. Many of these people don’t live in developed countries. A significant portion of the workforce works in jobs where they would never come into contact with anything more than an ordering system, such as customer service jobs like restaurants, coffee shops, retail, etc..

In 2015, there were an estimated 3 billion Internet users worldwide. If SAP had attained McDermott’s goal of 1 billion SAP users, then 1 out of every three people who had access to the Internet were also SAP users. Take a walk into any Starbucks. How many times do you see the SAPGUI up on people’s screens?

As a third point of comparison, in 2016, Gmail had 1 billion active monthly users. So, quite clearly, Gmail is a far more broadly used application than SAP.

Through multiple ways, McDermott could have asked someone who works for him to fact-check the likelihood that SAP would have had anywhere close to 1 billion users by 2015, and they could have told him that it was not a reasonable goal.

Conclusion and Calculation

SAP receives a 0% accuracy rating for having 1 billion users by 2015.

Link to the Parent Article

This is one of many research articles on a specific topic that supports a more extensive research calculation. For the overview of the research calculation for all of the SAP topics that were part of the study, see the following primary research A Study into SAP’s Accuracy.