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On Friday, SAP (News - Alert) shares dropped 2.8 percent, but the company promised to get business in the Pacific back on track in the second quarter. Jim Hagemann Snabe, SAP's co-chief executive, explained the poorer-than-expected results in the German cloud company’s Asian business. "We had some leadership changes in the region,” he said. “That is why we saw some misses in the quarter."

SAP provides software to companies looking for ways to better and more efficiently manage human resources, supplies and customer relations through the cloud. Cloud technology was expected to drive IT demand this year, and SAP has been pushing its services out of traditional hardware and into network and server based media.

Moving to the cloud has proven successful for businesses, like SAP, who have become major players in the abandoning of hardware storage in favor of the cloud. It’s a continuing trend from last year, which saw all sorts of companies and service providers like Jitterbit provide businesses with do very well with cloud integration.

SAP has been snatching market share from competitors like Oracle (News - Alert), which reported a two-percent decrease in sales for its third fiscal quarter that ended in February. As the demand for cloud increases, companies making the switch like SAP are seen as more stable than traditional alternatives in a time of economic downturn.

Reporting a revenue jump in the North American market and increases in Europe, the Middle East and Africa, SAP’s drop in Japan and the rest of Asia Pacific had them hurting a little more than the rest of the European technology index. The Asian market had SAP suffer a seven-percent decline in subscription sales revenue.

By 0932 GMT on Friday, SAP was down 2.8 percent, while the broader European index of tech companies were only down by 0.7 percent. Competition is fierce in trying to fill the demand for cloud services, which are expected to grow 18.5 percent this year to a total of $131 billion worldwide. Despite these poor first quarter results, Oliver Finger, an analyst for DZ Bank, still rates SAP as a 'buy,' saying, “We would not overemphasize the first-quarter results.”