SAP was forced to postpone an ambitious financial plan to take advantage of its cloud business due to a slower-than-expected recovery from on the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic. However, the vendor also said that it will increase its focus on those cloud operations in order to take advantage of what it views as the future of its operations.

Following up on its recent push to accelerate its cloud operations, SAP said it will further invest in that business at the expense of short-term margins. It expects that investment will nearly triple its cloud revenues to $26 billion by 2025.

“We are at an inflection point,” CEO Christian Klein said during a conference call about his company’s third-quarter 2020 financial results. “I am not willing to trade value to our customers for short-term margin optimization.”

That cloud focus was initiated in early 2019 under SAP’s previous CEO Bill McDermott. That plan included an ambitious goal to construct a path toward a 75% cloud gross margin by 2023. SAP is now focused on an 80% cloud gross margin target for 2025.

However, that plan has since run into a global pandemic that has left SAP scrambling. The vendor earlier this year sounded a positive tone on its ability to ride out the storm, including reiterating its full-year guidance.

But a rough third quarter forced SAP to reduce its financial expectations for the foreseeable future. SAP explained that its previous “best estimates concerning the timing and pace of recovery from the COVID-19 crisis” have not played out as expected and that it was now cutting expectations for the full year. This includes cutting its full-year cloud revenues by nearly 6% and its full-year total revenues by 2.5%.

“While SAP continues to see robust interest in its solutions to drive digital transformation as customers look to emerge from the crisis with more resilience and agility, lockdowns have been recently re-introduced in some regions and demand recovery has been more muted than expected,” the company noted in its Q3 earnings release.

For its latest quarter, SAP reported a 4% year-over-year drop in revenues. All of that came on the back of its software licensing and support business, which due to that segment’s size overshadowed an 11% increase in SAP’s cloud revenues for the quarter. Company management earlier this year had teased that it was seeing a recovery in software license revenues.

Despite the revenue dip, SAP culled spending enough and gained enough from its stake in Sapphire Ventures to score a 31% spike in post-tax profits for the quarter.

Investors are not handling the turmoil well sending SAP’s stock trading down more than 20% early Monday.

UPDATE: This story has been updated to clarify that Sapphire Ventures is not a part of SAP.