The past week was an exciting period for analytics, mainly because from Monday through Wednesday the annual SAP SAPphire conference was in full swing.  And more importantly, this year the event was all about HANA.

A lot of announcements relevant to HANA’s in-memory analytics appliance crossed the wire throughout the 3-day event, including partner news and case studies. What stood out most though was the update from SAP itself, which released the fourth service pack for the platform.

As of this week HANA is now integrated with Hadoop and Hive, and clients can move their data quite freely between the open source engine and their SAP environment. SP4 also ships with a new AWS instance for developers that are interesting in building their own data-driven apps on top of HANA.

SAP made a lot of headway in analytics this past week or so, and making its offering considerably more open than it was before was definitely a push in the right direction.

At the same time, competitor Tableau has made some progress of its own. A recent Gartner report looked into the industry’s performance over the past year, and found that Tableau was the single fastest growing company in this segment. Equally notable is the fact the BI software vendor ranked more than 60 percent ahead of the second name in the list, and had just as big of a lead over the entire market.

Xeround in turn expanded its cloud angle this week. The company’s database-as-a-service service can run on two additional platforms now – AppHarbor and PHP Fog. Both are popular cloud hosts for their respective languages, .NET and PHP, and are joining an existing list that includes names such as Amazon Web Services and the Rackspace Cloud.