Scavo was recently briefed on NetWeaver Cloud by SAP over a two-day period, and it took a while for him to fully grasp the strategy, he said in an interview Thursday. "They do not have their story clearly messaged."

While it shows promise on many fronts, NetWeaver Cloud is likely to be of interest primarily to existing SAP customers and partners, according to Scavo.

Moreover, far fewer companies today are using PaaS compared to SaaS, Scavo said.

However, "long term, the big selling point for SAP is they've got tens of thousands of customers," he added.

It's conceivable, therefore, that NetWeaver Cloud could become attractive for developers who aren't in the SAP world and want to develop entirely new applications on the platform, hoping to sell into that customer base, much like has happened with Force.com, Scavo said. "It looks like SAP has a complete vision for PaaS, and we'll see if they execute on it."