SAP co-head Bill McDermott has big plans for his company as a whole. In a Churchill Club session at the Four Seasons Hotel in Palo Alto, the chief executive said that SAP’s goal is to reach one billion users by 2015.

One billion is a big number, and “all the people who would touch an SAP system” count. That includes users of its core BI solutions, as well as people who use software from SuccessFactors, Ariba, and other recent acquisitions. Also falling in these categories are mobile device owners whose carrier happens to leverage a Sybase SMS system, and even households served by utilities that use SAP smart meters to get better insight to their data.

This lengthy list also includes users of SAP’s rapidly-accelerating HANA database. In the same interview, McDermott disclosed an internal forecast that sees a very bright future for the in-memory data analytics platform.

“In less than a year, HANA will be close to a $500 million market. Banking industry is a customer for cash management.”

The co-CEO added that in his view HANA allowed SAP to really get ahead of Oracle (which is incidentally suing again). This is the main reason why a big portion of the company’s portfolio will eventually be integrated with the big data solution somehow.

Morgan Stanley’s Adam Wood seems to agree with most of that. He added SAP to his firm’s Best Ideas list,  didn’t back down from his  Overweight rating of the stock and posted a predication of its own.

“We see a ‘blue sky’ HANA scenario that could drive >20% EPS growth for SAP, which we believe would see the shares over €80,” he wrote. Wood notes that data technology spending is set to grow 25%, with SAP a major beneficiary via HANA and Sybase.”