SAP Digs into PaaS with HANA Cloud

SAP announced HANA Cloud at its TechEd gathering in Last Vega this week.  The new services suite is based on the company’s in-memory database technology and offers advantages to a wide variety of users, from Java devs to enterprise that want to take HANA on a test run before making a big financial commitment.

The HANA Cloud Umbrella includes AppServices and DBServices, two very self-explanatory options for developers working on data-driven apps. These are joined by NetWeaver Cloud, a platform dedicated to Java apps that competes with Salesforce’s Heroku. SAP chief technology officer Vishal Sikka boasted that his firm’s platform scales faster than the competition.

“With the announcement of SAP HANA Cloud, we are paving the way for developers to build impactful applications in the cloud with embedded analytics and the massive speed of SAP HANA,” Sikka  said.

“Customers and partners will be able to build applications that meet the needs of the new reality – lightning fast, instant mobile access, deep analytics with delightful user experience. Putting SAP NetWeaver Cloud into the hands of developers today is a far-reaching first step toward that vision.”

The SAP HANA One platform was announced alongside the other services. The AWS offering provides more flexibility to prospective customers that want to test the waters, or run relatively small proof-of-concept projects. Users can store up to 32 gigabytes of data in an EC2-powered HANA environment for only $3.49 per hour, a very reasonable price point.

The BI firm is really pushing its analytical solutions, on both the innovation and marketing fronts. An SAP case study released yesterday described a 100 node, 100 TB in-memory system that’s leveraged by a major financial services provider whose name was not disclosed.  It’s based on HANA and can handle up to one petabytes of raw data, making it one of the biggest in-memory clusters in the world.