RealMoney

Evercore ISI analyst Stewart Materne III upgraded SAP to Outperform, stating that he believes the risk/reward is more attractive at current levels following the stock's 6% pullback. 2019 catalysts include the heart of the S/4 cycle and if SAP can execute to its FY18 targets he thinks there is upside to consensus estimates, added the analyst.

The CEOs of Adobe (ADBE), Microsoft (MSFT) and SAP (SAP) introduced the Open Data Initiative at the Microsoft Ignite conference earlier, stating that they are "joining forces to empower their mutual customers" with a common approach and set of resources for customers based on three guiding principles: Every organization owns and maintains complete, direct control of all their data; Customers can enable AI-driven business processes to derive insights and intelligence from unified behavioral and operational data; A broad partner ecosystem should be able to easily leverage an open and extensible data model to extend the solution. "Together with Adobe and SAP we are taking a first, critical step to helping companies achieve a level of customer and business understanding that has never before been possible. Organizations everywhere have a massive opportunity to build AI-powered digital feedback loops for predictive power, automated workflows and, ultimately, improved business outcomes," said Satya Nadella, CEO of Microsoft. To deliver on the Open Data Initiative, the three partners are enhancing interoperability and data exchange between their applications and platforms - Adobe Experience Cloud and Adobe Experience Platform, Microsoft Dynamics 365, SAP C/4HANA and S/4HANA - through a common data model. The data model will provide for the use of a common data lake service on Microsoft Azure. This unified data store will allow customers their choice of development tools and applications to build and deploy services.