Delay of OpenAI's IPO Boosts ServiceNow, SAP, and Workday and Challenges the 'Death of SaaS' Thesis
ServiceNow jumped nearly 10% and SAP closed up 2.16% on XETRA after reports that OpenAI's IPO is pushed to 2027. Workday and Datadog gained double digits.
The software market responded with a relief rally on Monday (29) to OpenAI's new IPO schedule. ServiceNow closed up about 10% on Wall Street, Workday rose 9.2%, and Datadog advanced 8.5%. In Europe, SAP gained 2.16% on XETRA, closing at €135.14, with the ADR traded in New York up 4.75%, at $155.09. Adobe and Salesforce, which have weighed on software indices since the beginning of the year, also finished the session in positive territory. The software sector outperformed the semiconductor sector by about seven percentage points on the day.
The trigger was a New York Times report from June 25 citing three individuals involved in OpenAI's deliberations, indicating that the company is likely to push its IPO to 2027. The choice, as described, is between listing in 2026 at a valuation below one trillion dollars or waiting and attempting to reach that mark the following year. OpenAI had secretly filed its S-1 with the SEC on June 8, which maintains flexibility to advance if conditions improve. The reading from the banks advising the IPO is that recent volatility in technology and the troubled debut of SpaceX's shares have soured retail investor appetite.
Analyst Interpretation and Counter Interpretation
Adam Tindle, an analyst at Raymond James, was quoted by desks that reacted first: the stocks that rose the most were precisely those considered most exposed to disruption risks from OpenAI, with ServiceNow at the forefront. For him, the delay in the listing is a proxy for the company’s difficulty in economically proving the agent-replaces-SaaS model on a 12 to 18-month horizon, which releases pent-up multiples for those selling workflow, ITSM, and HCM.
The opposing view comes from Brent Bracelin of Piper Sandler, who has been writing for weeks that the relationship between OpenAI's financial health and the cash flow of SAP or ServiceNow is looser than the rally suggests. For him, what pressures enterprise SaaS multiples is the entrance of Microsoft Foundry with Claude and Vertex with Gemini 3.5 Pro in GA, rather than a specific IPO window. It is worth noting that these two readings are not incompatible: the rally can be real and still reversible in the first week OpenAI demonstrates that the ARR of corporate seats has turned into cash.
Oracle and the Contrarian View
On the opposite side of the trading board that day, Oracle lost about 3% on Friday and opened Monday in the red. The explanation that circulated in the buy-side notes is straightforward: Oracle signed a cloud capacity contract in the region of $300 billion with OpenAI, and any repositioning of the IPO schedule by the counterpart affects the promised revenue curve. For Larry Ellison, any delay in recognized revenue from OpenAI is also a delay in validating the late hyperscaler thesis underpinning Stargate. For the market, it serves as a reminder that Oracle has shifted to a position of dependent supplier, rather than a neutral platform like its peers.
Where the Effect Reaches
In the UK and Germany, the movement directly impacts the capex committees of 2027 at major banks. UBS, Deutsche Bank, and BNP Paribas had been internally discussing whether to accelerate the migration of ITSM workloads to native agent competitors or to maintain ServiceNow as the orchestration layer. Monday's rally provides defenders of the latter option with a quantitative, albeit fragile, narrative to support their thesis before risk committees that were asking for numbers.
In Brazil, the effect is less visible, but it exists. Itaú, Bradesco, and Santander Brasil are paying multi-year contracts to SAP and ServiceNow indexed to the dollar, and any pressure for renegotiation cools when the vendor recovers multiples on the day. Meanwhile, CI&T and Stefanini, which are competing in SAP modernization fronts in retail and manufacturing, gain momentum to price their work without having to aggressively discount to accommodate the Microsoft Copilot cannibalization thesis.
What Monday's trading demonstrated is not that the thesis of AI disruption is dead. It showed that the market priced in a timeline too quickly in which OpenAI would execute smoothly. An 18-month window is enough time for SAP, ServiceNow, and Workday to deliver their own agents in production, and those who held long positions in these theses closed June comfortably.