There have been waves of SAP implementations over the years that ended up encumbered by large amounts of customizations, or "technical debt," creating burdensome landscapes that are difficult to upgrade, Reed said.

With a viable PaaS to develop cloud-based extensions, whether by customers or partners, upgrades to core SAP systems could be made much easier, albeit not seamless, Reed said.

IT organizations could focus custom work on the most crucial of the systems and use the cloud PaaS for less mission-critical enhancements, he said: "The point is, you'd have these choices ... instead of doing [customizations] at the drop of a hat, which is what a lot of SAP customers did."

As SAP continues to build out its PaaS and cloud offerings, things could get even more interesting, Reed said. "What they've done is started to think about this as a service-based environment." That means tying together SAP's mobile platform, on-demand BI (business intelligence) and other services with NetWeaver Cloud, allowing developers to tap a broader range of capabilities for their applications from one place.

But SAP also faces the marketing challenge of telling a cohesive story with all these moving pieces, Reed said. "If you create a platform, to make it easy for customers, it's got to make all kinds of sense to them."