At the SAP press conference today, I asked Bill McDermott, Co-CEO of SAP, specifically how SAP is different from Oracle? SAP has been the leader in business software for nearly four decades and McDermott had a compelling answer. Specifically, he said that despite “others” spending more than $50B in acquisitions to get into our space (we know who he means there) – SAP remains the dominant business software supplier and is more than double the size of the nearest competitor in this space.

McDermott emphasized in this video clip:

* SAP is sticking to its knitting – staying true to its core business

* He implied that Oracle’s acquisition of Sun was both risky and prompted by Oracle’s inability to surpass SAP as the leading business software player

* SAP will continue to focus on innovation in software

* SAP will stress an open ecosystem

“Focus, focus, focus…”

Focus was the watchword in this discussion. Innovation was a major theme from the press conference and I see SAP innovating in areas such as mobile, big data analytics and software-as-a-service. The acquisition of Sybase helps in these areas and the in-memory data push means that analytics can be brought much closer to business applications and analysis can be done in real time. You don’t usually think of SAP as an innovator but it’s clear that senior management is hell bent on investing and delivering innovation for customers.

With SAP, I still see a company in transition, fighting to keep a grip on its massive on-premise installed base and fending off SaaS upstarts like Netsuite. At the end of the day, the key to their success is innovation which is why mobile, big data and open ecosystems are critical. We’ll be at Oracle OpenWorld next week and see what the “Other” company has to say.

Here is my interview with Bill McDermott during our live exclusive coverage of the SAP Business Analytics press conference in Silicon Valley.