The Cube’s coverage of SAP’s annual Sapphire Now 2012 in Orlando, FL continued on day three of the conference. This year’s event was another opportunity for SAP to promote its transition from a traditional provider of on-premise ERP solutions to a cool vendor of mobile, cloud, social and big data enterprise solutions. Although everyone might not be sold on the new identity yet, SAP has been gobbling up companies and polishing up its marketing messages with complete confidence that soon everyone will embrace the newer, shinier image.

SiliconAngle founder John Furrier, Wikibon Data Analyst Jeff Kelly and Wikibon Co-founder Dave Vellante sat down to discuss their impressions of day three in front of the camera yesterday. Kelly kicked off the discussion saying,

“I had a few things I was looking for coming to the show. One of them was to see more customers on display actually using HANA in production, and we got that. Last year was a lot of talk about vision and future benefits. This year we saw them execute to some degree.”

Kelly added that SAP seems to be embracing big data, but redefining it in terms of their customers. This means terabytes of data, mostly stored in SAP – not the Internet scale repositories that many other providers discuss.

Data was clearly a central topic at Sapphire, but the CEOs have said they don’t really want to be associated with the hype of big data, which John Furrier considers a huge mistake. Furrier continued, this year’s conference everything was centered around one major gravitational pull, HANA. SAP really wanted to make the in-memory database real. On day three, the keynotes all focused on the technology, but according to Furrier, SAP might not have spent enough time really explaining what in-memory data really means. Kelly further cautioned that SAP should be careful with its constant attention to HANA. The company could risk alienating its customer base, most of which are still heavily invested in SAP’s traditional offerings.

Although HANA was the foundation of many Sapphire presentations and discussions, SAP also spent a notable amount of time making it clear to customers they are becoming a cloud company (if they weren’t already convinced by the huge sum SAP spent on SuccessFactors in February). The company’s on-premises offerings will still exist, but the cloud will play a much larger role in SAP’s success, as will social and mobile technologies. Beyond the technology evolution, Furrier explained, that SAP realizes it needs to grow its developer ecosystem; the company is making an effort to appeal to the development community.

Unlike last year’s conference, which focused heavily on the future and the possibilities for SAP, this year’s conference balanced the messaging with real-world customers using SAP technologies in production. However, SAP’s marketing is still moving faster than its implementation teams. All of the keynotes had a laser like focus on SAP’s core message. Dave Vellante pointed out, that SAP is evolving, but has made some missteps. SAP will need to demonstrate that it can deliver on its vision into the future.