SAP vice president of cloud computing Dinesh Sharma has plans in store for Facebook, he said in a recent interview in which he elaborated on his company’s social strategy.  This was one of the key elements behind the $4.3 billion acquisition of Ariba, and in the future it might serve the same central role in the realization of a HANA-powered social media solution.

Dinesh explains that while business users are not Facebook’s main demographic, 900 million users are still 900 million users. That is the overwhelming majority of the people working for SAP’s clients probably have an account on the site, and this sheer scale combined with the familiarity is where the business software vendor sees potential.

“Picture if you will a talent management worker in the human resources department of a major enterprise. On her tablet is a tool that would let her search for multiple people throughout the workforce who would be best suited to work together as a team on a collective project, sorted in order by their estimated availability and proximity to the place of business. The tool would have to judge these workers’ interest and attitudes based on such factors as what they tweet, what products they’ve liked on Facebook and what tech news stories they’ve commented on.”

The solution on the device would be an analytics solution capable of processing massive amounts of unstructured data, and HANA is more than suited for this purpose.   The company’s plan covers a very broad mobile vision, one that is powered by big data and the continued expansion of their portfolio of enterprise apps.

Companies are adopting social media not only internally but also externally, and the mobile cloud is only one trend that’s paving the way. A fresh Exhibitor report, for one, found that the percentage of marketers with an active networking presence increased by 90 percent since 2010.