“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.”

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.”

SiliconAngle.tv will continue its live coverage of SAPworld rom The Cube with interviews of more key executives from SAP, EMC, and SAP users all day tomorrow and Wednesday.