German software giant, SAP, said on Tuesday it expects its cloud computing business to continue to drive sales in the coming years.  However, profit growth will slow this year.

“SAP said in a statement that group sales, which totaled 16.9 billion euros ($22.9 billion) last year, would rise to ‘at least 20 billion euros’ in 2015 and subsequently to ‘at least 22 billion euros’ in 2017.”

Of course, the larger question is what clouds are they selling?  I suspect that most of the growth is driven by hosted deployments of SAP software, as well as Hana, their in-memory database that’s getting some good attention.  However, to call SAP a “cloud company” is still a bit of stretch right now.

SAP is playing the ‘cloud washing game.’  “SAP, like many vendors, is stretching the definition of cloud to make that business look as large as possible. But given tha[t] more than 90% of SAP’s revenues are still tied to conventional on-premises software, it will get harder for SAP to keep reporting the double-digit gains it has been reporting during the last three years — barring more expensive cloud acquisitions.”

Like other enterprises players, the growth of cloud computing will have some positive effects on one end of their customer base, but cannibalize the traditional business on the other end.