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Searching beyond Google

The other area SAP has high hopes for is search. But the company isn't necessarily competing with search goliath Google. While SAP already offers search features in its Netweaver platform, Moore said SAP's latest planned enterprise search service is very different than what Google offers.

"Internet search is built around links from one document to another, but in the enterprise there are very few of those kind of links," said Moore. "There's a huge, unexploited area of internal meta data you can't get over the Internet."

Greenbaum said he's long been a skeptic about search being a supremely critical application as Google and its competitors believe. "But the ability to search structured and unstructured information in an analytical way can be very successful."

Currently in beta, Moore said the as yet unnamed, and un-priced enterprise search service will be released sometime in the first half of next year. It will automatically tie into a user's security settings and profile providing different results depending on the user. For example, a search on Moore's name showed the people he reports to and report to him, among other links.

Software as an optional service

SaaS (define) is also very much in SAP's plans. Earlier this year, SAP announced a major investment in software-as-a-service, though it's far from moving dramatically to the on-demand model.

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Graf said SaaS has a lot of value, but is more limited than SaaS proponents like Salesforce.com market it to be.

"We don't see on-demand software as an all-encompassing truth," said Graf. "It has great benefit and we like the fact it lets us get the value of our software out to customers quickly. But it's more of an onramp" than a final destination.

SAP gives customers the option to bring its on-demand applications in-house for more direct control and development.

Analyst Charles King thinks this hybrid approach is one of many smart moves, including its focus on SOA, which SAP has made in the past year to ensure continued growth.

"There's been some noise from competitors about SAP customers being slow to adopt its next-generation technology, but these are large customers that tend to be very slow to make changes," King, with Pund-IT Research, told internetnews.com. "These kind of sales can take months or years.

"The key thing is SAP already has a big customer base with tens of millions of dollars of investment, and most of them aren't likely to go elsewhere."