This week business intelligence software maker SAP held an earnings call for the second quarter of fiscal 2012.

The company generated a profit of €0.92 billion, 7 percent more than in the same period last year, on revenue of €3.90 billion. That’s about 4.75 billion US dollars – 12 percent more than what SAP reported for the second quarter of 2011, and higher than Wall Street’s consensus estimate of €3.3 billion, or roughly $4 billion.

Software income rose by 26 percent to $1.06 billion and software and software-related services sales increased by almost as much, 21 percent, to €3.12 billion. The full report will be made available later this month, but the vendor did disclose a few extra details that offer a somewhat more thorough deeper breakdown. This particular tidbit is very worthwhile:

“The company also strengthened its leadership in enterprise mobility. SAP HANA and the database business had an outstanding quarter with significant deals in all regions. Key industries such as financial services and retail as well as continued expansion of sales through SAP partners contributed significantly to the company’s top-line.”

And also, “SAP demonstrated strong growth in the second quarter. All regions posted double-digit revenue gains…Cloud momentum continued, driven by synergies between SuccessFactors and SAP.”

Cloud and big data are becoming bigger and bigger parts of SAP’s business, now that increasing demand from clients means that it has to get involved in these two areas if it wants to be competitive with the likes of IBM and Oracle. The latter recently suffered a legal blow after an EU court ruled that its software can be legally resold by third parties: this decision is not written in stone until the German court directly handling the case will come up with an official ruling but it’s a definite win for UsedSoft, the defendant.