First is to make sure we are delivering the best innovation—whether it's mobile-user interfaces or breakthrough new analytic solutions or business-user products. On the other, there's the business process platform, where you run your mission-critical, core business processes: financials, procurement, supply chain management and so forth.

To be able to do all of that in this entire spectrum [in a way] that is coherent, that the cost of operating this for our customers is low, and that the cost of maintaining it for our maintenance organizations is also low [is our goal].

So that's the duality: We used to think in the industry that this was a divide; that you either had innovation or integrity. What we have established in the last two years is that it is possible to architect software in a way that you can consume innovation that comes in, include innovation in [products] very rapidly, and you can constantly do that without breaking your integrity.

CIO.com: What's an example of that?

Sikka: With Business Suite 7, we now have a little more than 3,000 enterprise services. These make the entire suite essentially programmable from the outside. Even though we have tens of thousands of screens on this suite and we have hundreds and hundreds of business processes on the suite, there are always more user interfaces and processes that customers or partners build. And that process has gone further in other products, like in CRM and Business ByDesign.

There is a service layer for that entire UI, so the UI is totally decoupled. That means that we can add mobile UIs very rapidly, as we did that with RIM and the BlackBerry, and now with Sybase. And we're doing it with Apple and the iPhone, though we haven't announced those yet. We are doing work in the labs to bring those new UIs in without changing the underlying application in any way.

CIO.com: What about the difference between customers who are two upgrades behind and don't need any innovation versus those who expect it continuously—how do you balance that?

Sikka: The way SAP looks at the relationship with customers in the timeless software paradigm is that the relationship is what is timeless; everything else changes. Every one of our customers has a multiyear relationship with us. We have more than 100 customers who have been with us for more than 30 years.

When you talk about innovation and leading edge versus non-leading edge, I think of it this way: There are customers for whom innovation is a necessity, and there are customers for whom innovation is a comfort.

For those for whom it's a necessity, we deliver [innovation] as it comes. For the others, they take comfort in the fact that innovation is there when they are ready for it.

But we do have customers that are so leading edge that we don't yet have products for them. We work with them on customer innovation engagements and on things that aren't even products yet. In fact, on things that might not even become products because there might not be enough scale underneath [to support] them. We can even take it into production with those customers in a one-off way.

CIO.com: There's been so much made of "The Cloud" and where SAP's products and strategy fits into cloud computing. What's your take?

Sikka: Overall our cloud strategy is in four parts.

The first building block of our cloud is to make sure our software is ready to be consumed by our customers. Today, we have hundreds of customers that use our software to deliver mission-critical cloud services to their customers, partners, employees and suppliers on far bigger scales than some of these SaaS companies.

For example, one of our large banking customers in Germany has 40 million customers and they're running our software for transactional banking. There are days when they do 8 million transactions in one hour. These are mission-critical transactions; this is not like updating your pipeline status or contact address, or something like that. We work with our partners—like HP, IBM, VMware, Citrix—to make sure our software is ready to provide cloud-based economies to our customers and their business networks.