SAP announced great financial results with their official Q3 2011 earnings this morning. They had a very strong quarter. SAP continues to grow the core business – Business Suite, Business Analytics – with new innovations around In-memory (HANA), Mobility and Cloud driving further gains and positively impacting their financial performance. SAP saw double digit growth across all their regions.

SAP earnings beat analysts’ estimates as new mobile and real-time analytics offerings boosted sales. Co-CEO Bill McDermott also noted that SAP now has a 600 million euro pipeline for HANA. Previously, McDermott said in July that “the pipeline for Hana is the biggest in the history of SAP.” Looks like he delivered.

I’ve had a chance to meet the CEOs and interview them both since they took over. It’s been an impressive turnaround for SAP management.

I had a chance to sit down with the SAP President of North America Bob Courteau in Silicon Valley last week at the recent SAP World Tour. Bob runs everything in North American except the SAP Labs. Here is quick Socialcam video interview with Bob. He was very candid

SAP is a company on the march and as President Bob Courteau said in my interview “this place is fired up.. not only are we doing great things for our customers…SAP is a flat out fun place to work right now.. Jim and Bill are natural leaders individually and when you put them together and it’s incredible what we have going on with the company”.

Courteau went to on share that SAP is living the reality that the business and personal worlds are coming together and their technology and business software will make that transition happen faster. With mobile, big data, and in memory HANA technology SAP is positioned perfectly in these new development models that are emerging. Sales are booming and with Bob’s team they feel really good about their prospects.

CEO Interview last May at Sapphire in Orlando

“We have gotten a lot of positive feedback on our innovation strategy in the last year,” says SAP Co-CEO Jim Hagemann Snabe. “We are very confident that this is a time to innovate, not consolidate.”

SAP and Sybase together have 170,000 customers running their software in-house, he told Wikibon Co-Founder David Vellante and SiliconAngle Founder John Furrier in a live webcast interview on www.siliconangle.tv at the end of the first day of SAPworld 2011. This base technology is vital to businesses, who need strong, quality core systems to run basic functions dependably. That solid software becomes the base that allows customers to innovate, for instance by developing mobile enterprises. So, he says, “Consistency enables flexibility.”

But those systems cannot stand still. “We want to bring disruptive technologies to those customers without disrupting their infrastructures. We can do that because we have installed a very modern platform in those customers.”

Here is my interview with SAP co-CEO Jim Hagemann Snabe

To do that, SAP is developing a rapid innovation cycle. Snabe promised that the innovation cycle for enterprise applications will shrink from 15 to 6 months, and the innovation cycle for Business ByDesign, SAP’s SaaS offering, will probably decrease to six weeks. He also promises that SAP will shrink installation times for its ERP system from months down to weeks, an incredible statement for those who remember the early days when installation and customization of a large SAP system took two years. To do that, he says, SAP is depending on per-packaged best practices based on customer experiences.

Second, SAP is developing in-memory data storage based on Sybase technology, which he says will provide “unbelievable speed” while collapsing the infrastructure and simplifying the entire IT environment. Simplification, he says, is one of the key demands of customers. “For years we have added complexity. Now we need to add simplicity, not by focusing on solving simple problems but by innovating.” Innovations like SaaS and rapid deployment solutions also contribute to the simplification program.

Cloud computing is the third major focus of innovation that SAP has identified. However, he says, in part in a reference to the cloud service crashes of recent weeks, business needs cloud services that provide enterprise-level security and stability. The first of those for SAP is Business ByDesign, its SaaS ERP solution for SMBs. “We were late bringing ByDesign out because we needed to build in that stability and security,” he says. “We were criticized for being late, but now we see the benefit of that work.”

Going Forward SAP Positioned Well For Cloud & Mobile

SAP believes it is ahead of its rivals in the technology even as the cloud, big data, and mobile markets are just now getting going. Main rival Oracle put out their vision of cloud last month at Oracle OpenWorld (SiliconANGLE.tv Oracle OpenWorld video coverage here). On a stock basis main SAP rivals Oracle (ORCL), IBM (IBM) and Salesforce.com (CRM) are trending down.

SAP’s turnaround from a legacy vendor to a modern software player is quite astonishing. I always liked their web services SOA vision from years ago and it looks like that vision was a big early but now it’s paying off. Add Sybase to the mix with advances in software and converged infrastructure it looks a like a bright future for SAP.

We had extensive SiliconANGLE original content coverage of SAP at Sapphire – video library is here; full coverage here>.