SAP's recent move to acquire intellectual property and personnel from application development vendor Coghead was part of this goal, he said.

Integration hasn't always been a strong point for on-demand applications, Sikka said. Various on-demand "edge applications" for talent management and CRM (customer relationship management) have added value for customers, but become "islands" for IT departments to stitch together, according to Sikka.

Sikka also touched upon one of the most highly anticipated components of SAP's cloud strategy, its Business ByDesign on-demand ERP suite for the midmarket. SAP has scaled back the rollout of the application until it can figure out how to turn enough of a profit at scale.

This is no trivial matter, Vishal said, given the complexity and ambition of the software, which encompasses ERP, CRM, supply chain management and several other areas.

"It is one thing to do one thing, like sales force automation, and run that on an Oracle database and call yourself a platform," he said. It's another matter to execute a complex inventory-checking process in a cloud model, according to Sikka.