SAP has announced that it will offer a subscription-based version of HANA to help customers sidestep around the complexity associated with on-premise deployments of its speedy in-memory database. This new hosted edition aims to kill two birds with one stone by addressing time-to-value and total cost of ownership.

According to the company, SAP HANA Enterprise Cloud can support petabyte scale instances of its CRM, ERP and NetWeaver data warehousing applications. The solution will be availablefrom SAP and partner-operated data centers around the globe for a monthly fee.

“With SAP HANA Enterprise Cloud, we are addressing a fundamental customer need that we have seen since we first launched HANA,” said Dr. Vishal Sikka, member of the Executive Board of SAP AG, Technology and Innovation. “Customers want more and more options in how they take advantage of the value SAP HANA brings. With the SAP HANA Enterprise Cloud, we are delivering HANA at scale with instant value and no compromise. We are simplifying customers’ experience and expanding their choice in how they want to adopt SAP HANA, now bringing it to a massive scale for enterprise mission critical applications – and we are doing this without disruption through the cloud.”

SAP’s mostly traditional customers have no plans to move their mission-critical apps to the cloud in the near future, but the BI giant is nonetheless expanding its footprint in this space, and quite successfully at that.

Less than a week ago the company announced a rapid deployment toolkit that enables users to test an application in the cloud before moving it into their private production environments. The suite has the same goals as HANA Enterprise Cloud: reduce the time and cost of rolling out new technologies.