During the course of an event at its New York City headquarters yesterday intended to encourage customers to continue investing in IT during these tough times, SAP co-CEO Leo Apotheker made a somewhat puzzling leap in logic.

Apotheker, who is scheduled to become the sole CEO of SAP in 2009, said the company was purposely slowing the roll out of its SAP Business ByDesign software-as-a-service (SaaS) offering because of fears over what the impact this product would have on the company's profit margins.

Apotheker reasoned that if too many customers opted to buy SAP Business ByDesign, fewer of them would be buying SAP's on-premises software. This would result in lower SAP margins that would be punished on Wall Street in the form of a lower stock price. That may or may not be true. Wall Street could easily conclude that SAP is moving to cautiously against more nimble SaaS rivals.

But what made the comment troubling is that it was made during an event called No Better Time for Smart IT: Why Investing in IT Makes Sense in Troubled Times. If customers applied to same logic that Apotheker is using to justify slowing down the company's SaaS product roll out, they would conclude that the best thing for them to do would be to not invest in any new software at the moment in order to shore up their own company's bottom lines because, theoretically, Wall Street might punish them for having a lower net income after they chose to invest in more enterprise software.

Given the fact that SAP is actively encouraging customers to invest in more enterprise software during these troubled times, is seems a little more than perplexing that in the very next breath SAP says it is purposely limiting its customers options to save money.

To be sure, Apotheker offered up a lot of good ideas. He suggested that during these times the top three types of SAP software that customers should be investing in are cash management software, business intelligence tools and supply chain software. The reasoning behind the first two are obvious, but Apotheker also pointed out that in these times critical suppliers can collapse over night so customers had better have enhanced visibility into their supply chain liabilities.

Apotheker also noted that SAP is moving to lower the total cost of ownership of SAP software substantially. The next version of the company's entire line of software will share a common user interface that will make it easier for customers to learn and navigate SAP applications. The company also plans to slowly phase out the fork lift upgrade concept all together by making future enhancement to SAP software available as modular "enhancement packs" that customers can choose to deploy at their own pace.

Apotheker said the company would be adding support for in-memory database technology that will not only substantially improve the performance of SAP applications, but also create a platform for running more compute-intensive business intelligence applications a whole lot faster.

Finally, Apotheker also said that SAP is moving to decrease the overall cost of running SAP by making more services available from SAP. The basic idea is that an additional investment in services from SAP will ultimately lower the cost of running the software over an extended period of time.

There's no doubt that SAP is taking the current economic issues of its customers to heart. But it's a shame the one short-sighted view of SaaS appears to be sending customers a conflicting message at a time when the leading technology vendors should be establishing thought leadership positions on the economy that look past their own immediate financial results.