SAP rolled out a list of new enhancements, features and integrations for SAP HANA today, demonstrating how SAP is treating it as a foundation for growth and acceleration of its core technology.

Perhaps most significant is the news that SAP HANA stands as the world’s largest in-memory database. It can handle ten billion records, 100 terabytes of data and 200 million query responses.

It also delivers a clear message to Oracle that SAP is after them and has the data to prove it.

Here’s a quick break down on what SAP announced today:

A HANA Service Pack new releases that include:
– Ability to integrate data from Hadoop
– New text (unstructured data) search capabilities
– Interoperability with R, the statistical programming environment.

Availability for developers on AWS to build custom analytic applications
A HANA start-up accelerator
A new support for scale-out, multi-node HANA deployments
A visual intelligence application
New HANA applications

One aspect of this I find of partiuclar inrterest is the new data visualization environment for HANA.

SAP Visual Intelligence (SVI)is a desktop version of SAP BusinessObjects Explorer software and powered by the SAP HANA platform. It acquires data from corporate and personal data sources without scripting. Users can then analyze it and create visualizations.

It’s a move that puts SAP in competition with companies like Tabeau, which is also focusing on hooking its data visualization engine with big data analytics environments .

It does on the fly analysis, which shows the power that HANA offers. It’s also further proof that SAP is focusing on providing more reasons to use HANA in a business setting.

Visual Intelligence does not require HANA. It connects to and reads information from SAP HANA. That points to how HANA will mature as a technological foundation for SAP applications.

Other aspects of the news that should be noted:

Hadoop: SAP announced this originally last Fall. it points to how Hadoop can act as a store for active data that can flow into HANA for real-time analysis.SAP is partnering with Cloudera, which will provide the Hadoop distribution. It will read HANA and load to Hive and Hadoop.

Startup Accelerator: SAP realizes that there is a need for the big data ecosystem to build out.

More AWS Integration: AWS is an important partner. By offering custom app development on AWS, SAP can target the ISV market for cloud apps. That’s also a focus for AWS. Good partnership.