SAP

A €34.18 billion enterprise software organism operates as ecosystem engineer at global scale, where 77% of transaction revenue worldwide touches SAP systems—creating dependency relationships that mirror mycorrhizal fungi, which 90% of plant species require for nutrient uptake. The 440,000+ customers in 180 countries don't just use SAP; they've restructured business processes around it, creating path dependence so profound that migration costs often exceed rebuild costs. This stickiness generated €17.14 billion in cloud revenue (up 25%) and €63.3 billion in total cloud backlog, demonstrating how switching costs compound over time.

The 2024 restructuring program—€3.1 billion in expenses to eliminate redundancies while boosting non-IFRS operating profit 25% to €8.15 billion—reveals autophagy under selection pressure. As cloud competitors intensified, SAP pruned legacy workforce and on-premise infrastructure to reallocate resources toward cloud ERP Suite (33% growth, €14.17B revenue) and AI capabilities. The company delivered 1,300+ generative AI use cases in 2024, embedding AI in 50% of Q4 deals. This mirrors how organisms facing environmental stress digest non-essential proteins to fuel adaptive mutations.

The €100 billion+ partner ecosystem—generating 3x SAP's own revenue through implementation, customization, and maintenance—demonstrates the ten-percent rule from trophic ecology. SAP occupies the producer level, capturing just a fraction of total value while enabling massive downstream economic activity. This architecture creates coalition formation at scale: consulting firms (Accenture, Deloitte), cloud providers (AWS, Azure), and industry specialists form a protective moat. Any competitor must dislodge not just SAP but the entire symbiotic network, a coordination problem that keeps the incumbent stable even as individual components evolve.