Software maker SAP held its earnings call for the third quarter of 2011, and reported some pretty positive results.  Net profit rose to $1.77 billion from $708.9 million a year earlier.  Ten percent of that comes from SAP’s relatively new ventures into mobile, the cloud and analytics – including HANA, the in-memory big data appliance that generated $84 million in sales in the past 9 months. Co-CEO Bill McDermott said during the call that he expects that number to double in the fourth quarter.

The company hopes these new initiatives will account for a quarter of a $220 billion revenue goal it’s aiming to achieve by 2015.

Shareholders and analysts have paid close attention to SAP’s Q3 earnings and outlook, which didn’t disappoint.

“SAP rose 1.5 percent to close at 43.48 euros after trading down as much as 1.3 percent earlier in the day. The stock is up 14 percent this year, giving the company a market value of about 53.4 billion euros.”

SiliconANGLE founder John Furrier wrote a post for Forbes in which he looked into some of the factors that are standing behind SAP’s growth and adaptation to the latest market trends.  One of those is SAP’s vision, which is to help companies adopt the consumerization of IT using its technology, according to president Bob Courteau.

Two other equally significant aspects of that vision are speed and simplification.  In an interview with Furrier, co-CEO Jim Snabe described how SAP is exploring ways to shrink its application development cycle from 15 to 6 months, in addition to making the cloud simpler – one of the biggest demands the company’s customers present.

SAP is expanding its business strategy using in-house innovation, rather than focusing more on making buyouts like competitor Oracle.  The former announced SAP Business One 8.82 this week, the latest version of its CRM platform that features simplified configuration and inventory management, as well as enhanced functionality.