Update: A Microsoft spokesperson has since got in contact to clarify that Ballmer was actually repeating a figure of 500 million Windows 7 license sales that was announced in December - explaining this means there is an installed base of 500 million potential users that could be upgraded to Windows 8.

While that changes the context of his comments in the article below slightly, it still shows that Microsoft has high hopes that its new operating system will be adopted by the majority of its vast user base.

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Shy, retiring and wallflower are not a phrases you'd ever hear in connection with Microsoft's chief executive Steve Ballmer.

He's one of life's characters, you might say, although we say this with respect, as Ballmer's enthusiasm is a refreshing change from many dry and dusty chief executives that can waffle on for hours without saying anything remotely interesting.

In that spirit, Ballmer once again has hogged the spotlight with comments in Seoul, South Korea, in which he estimated Microsoft will have 500 million users of its forthcoming Windows 8 system in the next year, according to a report by the AFP.

Such a figure, when considered in detail, is hard to place - would that be good or bad for Microsoft?

Well, firstly, there must be far more than 500 million Windows machines in operation at present, running everything from Windows Vista to Windows 7. So 500 million could seem low in that context.

However, these platforms have had years to establish themselves in the market, and during periods of little competition, unlike now as Apple starts to make inroads into the desktop market and consumers eschew laptops and home PCs for iPhones and iPads.

Perhaps, then, 500 million would be a success for Microsoft, especially when set against data it announced in 2010 that it had shifted 175 million copies of Windows 7 within the first nine months in which it was released.

However, estimates from analyst firms don't even place total PC sales for the entire market at above 500 million in 2012. Gartner estimates around 440 million units will be sold this year, suggesting Ballmer's boasts may be a tad speculative.

Then again, Microsoft is pushing Windows 8 as a product not just for the desktop, but also the smartphone and tablet markets.

This could well mean that, if manufacturers such as Samsung, Dell, Acer, Nokia and Fujitsu all push new tablets to the market, 500 million may even be a modest estimate, especially as consumers and businesses in developing nations start to embrace these devices for the first time.

Ultimately, only time, and sales figures, will prove how popular the new platform from Microsoft proves to be - even the head of Windows has admitted it's a ‘bet' on the future of computing - but you can be sure Ballmer will be the first to let the world know if his prediction comes true.

When SAP announced its decision to buy SuccessFactors in December last year, commentators and analysts said the purchase was a big deal, and not just because the acquisition cost SAP $3.4bn - a 52 per cent premium on the closing price of SuccessFactors at the time.

The purchase was hailed as significant because it could change SAP's delivery of cloud computing applications.

For the last five years SAP's cloud strategy revolved around Business ByDesign, a set of on-demand enterprise resource planning (ERP) applications for the mid-market that includes software for financials, human resources, supply chain management, business analytics and compliance management.

The SuccessFactors technology gave SAP the capability to put core business applications into the cloud as standalone offerings. And this is exactly what SAP has done now, revealing its new strategy at the Sapphire customer event in Orlando.

SuccessFactors clearly stole the limelight at the event - even from SAP's baby of the moment, in-memory database Hana.

Jim Hagemann Snabe, SAP co-chief executive, said a new SAP cloud business unit had been created to save the firm from integrating SuccessFactors technology with its own, and to ensure SAP did not risk hurting its newly acquired powerful portfolio of cloud technology.

Perhaps even more interesting is that SAP is quickly dumping its Business ByDesign set of applications for the newer model of SuccessFactors.

It was the SuccessFactors founder and chief executive Lars Dalgaard who broke the news.

"Business ByDesign was a beautiful vision but it was too big. Everyone does not want to put all their apps out in the cloud in one go. It was intimidating," he said.

SAP will now break up Business ByDesign into a number of different applications that customers can buy as they like.

"The pricing of these applications is attractive and their availability is immediate," added Dalgaard.

Snabe also admitted during a press conference that trying to create cloud versions of on-premise applications, like SAP did with Business ByDesign, was not the right approach to the cloud. He said that Microsoft with its Dynamics offering, and Oracle with its Fusion alternative, would soon find this out.

"It is a fundamental mistake to take an app that is designed for on-premise and put it in the cloud," said Snabe.

"We know this because we worked on Business ByDesign. The fact that they [Oracle and Microsoft] started to create them [Fusion and Dynamics] six years ago, tells you they cannot have been creating them with the cloud in mind."

In an interesting move, SAP has decided to start targeting consumers with its business product portfolio.

Now it's not every day that the average consumer wants to pick up a new enterprise resource planning or business process system, but since SAP has entered the more exciting IT areas of in-memory computing, cloud computing, mobile technology and analytics, the firm clearly believes it has something to offer the wider public.

Targeting consumers may be a clever move that other software companies could follow, especially with the growing trend to IT consumerisation in businesses, and the fact that business staff - rather than IT staff - are increasingly dictating IT purchasing decisions.

Not only that, but consumers are often bringing the technology they use at home to work with them, and vice versa.

Either that, or SAP will find that consumers' interest in technology ends at social networks, smartphones, and online retail, and they are not in fact interested in big data analytics and new computing architectures.

The way in which SAP will talk to consumers is through a new global advertising campaign (what else?) that aims to showcase the recent advancements it has made in IT.

The 'Run Like Never Before' campaign will be managed SAP's advertising partner, Oglivy & Mather and coincides with SAP's 40th anniversary.

The advertising firm said the campaign is geared to be unlike traditional business-to-business advertising in order to connect "on a human-level".

It added that the campaign will feature "high-energy music, engaging imagery and film techniques that are commonly see in consumer advertising".

All well and good, but whether or not the IT revolution has reached the stage of SAP becoming a household name remains to be seen. After all, it's hard to imagine your nan asking for help running her Business ByDesign account, but you never know.

SAP co-chief executive Jim Snabe went on the offensive at the company's Influencer Summit 2011 in Boston on Tuesday, promising "innovation without disruption" across mobile, cloud, in-memory computing and its core systems, and offering new features to its on-demand customers every quarter.

Snabe was keen to impress that, despite the firm's near 40-year history of designing and building "core" business software, the German firm is making huge strides in newer technology categories.

In a dig at arch rival Oracle's disruptive updates, Snabe claimed that SAP is able to offer continuous improvements to the firm's flagship on-premise Business Suite product.

"We've decided to go from annual releases of enhancements to quarterly opportunities to consume innovation," he said. "From next year these are the new features you will be able to consume on top of the Business Suite without any upgrade at the pace you want."

Snabe said that as a result Business Suite will not need another upgrade until 2020, although some analysts questioned the strategy.

Ray Wang, chief executive of Constellation Research, argued that there may still be too much disruption for customers.

"#SAP customers won't be able to handle quarterly updates in on-premises world. They need to be in #saas to do this," he tweeted at the event.

The SAP UK & Ireland User Group sees things slightly differently, however. "The important thing here is that SAP is giving customers the choice in how and when they adopt some of the innovative technologies and solutions the company is developing," said chairman Alan Bowling.

"This is a smart move by SAP, as it means those customers who have not yet moved to the latest versions of ERP now have more incentive to do so. It also makes it much easier for users to invest further in new SAP modules."

Elsewhere during the keynote there were the usual bold predictions - "we want to reach one billion people with our mobile solutions" and "Hana can replace data warehouses" - as well as some admissions that things haven't always been done right in the past.

"You don't get things right if you take an on-premise solution and throw it into the cloud. We've tried that, trust me," said Snabe.

Most interestingly, however, he argued that SAP could actually begin to differentiate in the cloud by offering zero integration time and a great user experience.

"That is kind of a new thought for SAP," Snabe remarked. About time too.

The announcement that RIM is adding support to Microsoft Office 365 should be welcome news to firms that have investments in BlackBerrys and Microsoft's email system, a group which no doubt makes up a large proportion of the business world.

RIM's BlackBerry Business Cloud Services offers access to Microsoft Exchange Online email, as well as calendar, contacts, tasks and memos via the BlackBerry. And even better for IT workers is the news that they can provision, manage and secure individual handsets using a web-based console.

If RIM handles this rollout correctly, it could reinvigorate its popularity in the business world, letting its enterprise customers take advantage of the latest cloud technologies from Microsoft while still retaining the famed BlackBerry security standards.

However, there are still challenges for RIM to overcome, highlighted to V3 during a conversation with the global IT manager of a UK media company off the back of Tuesday's announcement.

The first of these is the recent BlackBerry outage issues.

"Our confidence in RIM has taken a bit of a bashing recently with the outages. Do I really want to put 200 users in a new cloud service, when the reliability hasn't been proved?" he said.

Another issue is the early stage status of the BlackBerry Business Cloud Services. The company V3 spoke to is in the process of a move to Office 365, so has been eagerly awaiting this move from RIM.

"As someone who's responsible for the email of the entire company, am I really comfortable using a beta version?" he questioned.

However, he added that there is pressure from elsewhere in the business to adopt the technology as soon as possible, now that the investment has been made in Office 365.

"I've got close to 200 BlackBerry users, and otherwise I need to keep those mail boxes in house, rather than move them to the cloud," he said.

On the positive side, he welcomed the news that this technology could be free of charge for organisations, as there was a concern that there would be an additional cost to tie the two products together.

And he supported V3's initial suspicions that this release has been timed to help RIM wipe away lingering concerns over the recent service outages.

"The expectation was that this release wouldn't be ready until Christmas, so it's very useful that they're doing it now," he said.

If RIM did indeed rush this one out earlier than planned, hopefully it won't backfire and end up with glitches in the technology and more unhappy customers.

Most business intelligence (BI) firms talk up their mobile strategy in some shape or form, but one company is keeping notably quiet about its agenda, and that's Microsoft.

The small pure-play BI firms, such as QlikTech and Microstrategy, were the first to lead BI into the mobile sphere a couple of years ago.

Since then, many of the stack vendors have followed suit, most notably SAP with Business Objects Mobile in 2010, which is probably the most robust and pervasive mobile offering from all of the stack vendors, and supports the most mobile devices.

IBM follows closely with Cognos Mobile for the BlackBerry and the recent support it added for the iPhone at the end of 2010, while Oracle released Business Intelligence Mobile for devices running iOS earlier this year.

As each firm makes a mobile update, they are heralded as the only way forward for BI.

So what is Microsoft doing? Not much it seems.

Redmond's BI offering is available as part of the Office and SharePoint Server suites, and is built on the SQL Server platform, with Excel providing one of the main BI interfaces for users, as well as the dashboards from SharePoint Server.

When it comes to mobile, though, Microsoft BI runs only on the Windows platform, so that means compatibility with just Windows 7 devices.

Donald Farmer, the former face of Microsoft BI, who has now left to work for QlikView, said that when he left Microsoft in January this year the BI team was not thinking in mobile terms at all.

When asked what Microsoft's BI strategy involves, he replied: "Great question. I wish I knew!"

"Microsoft's mobile strategy is tied up with Windows 7. There was no mobile strategy that filtered down to individual teams while I was there. It's only such a large company that can release a product with no knowledge of its future strategy. You won't find Steve Ballmer losing sleep over BI," he told V3.

One customer, frustrated by Microsoft's lack of mobile strategy, has posted a comment on the company's BI Facebook page.

"What is Microsoft's mobile BI strategy? Please think beyond Windows 7 phones - it must work on all platforms," said Tricia Wilcox Almas.

"This trend is not going away and I need tools now. My clients will abandon their Microsoft bias if there is no offering and others are willing to fill in the gap!"

Microsoft told her that its strategy is to allow partners to build "a host of mobile apps to meet a variety of scenarios".

"You can expect more from us in the phone and slate form factors. More to come," the firm added.

Microsoft could not comment on its mobile BI strategy at the time this story was published, but it wouldn't be surprising to see the firm make an acquisition in the area to build out its capabilities.