As earnings season kicks into gear, #4 SAP’s great Q3 preliminary financial results were overshadowed by Bill McDermott’s decision to step down after a highly successful decade as CEO. McDermott tripled SAP’s market cap during that tenure in large part by infusing a customer-centric culture within the company. He also pushed SAP aggressively into the cloud and beyond the on-premises business that made it the pre-eminent applications vendor in the world. Success always comes at a cost. For SAP that’s meant a relentless wave of incursions—some successful, some rebuffed—by competitors looking to snatch some of SAP’s huge global market share.

#3 Salesforce, #5 Oracle and #8 Workday have all been hammering at SAP’s customer base in ERP, HCM and CRM. Yet in spite of that, SAP’s cloud business grew 37% for Q3. That’s definitely a tribute to McDermott’s leadership and the company’s overall commitment and capability. Now it’s up to newly named co-CEOs Jen Morgan and Christian Klein to drive that success forward as customer expectations rise in today’s digital economy. Fairly or not, Morgan and Klein will be judged heavily by the Q4 results that SAP reports 3 months from now. In the meantime, the ferocious competitive attacks will only escalate. That’s great news for customers who stand to benefit from that unbridled competition. We’ll see how well Morgan and Klein respond to this weighty challenge.