Now that developers have become a dominant driver of technology adoption in the enterprise, SAP is reevaluating its priorities for HANA. At its TechEd practitioner conference in Bangalore this week, the business intelligence giant introduced a hosted IDE that aims to radically simplify the creation of backend applications on top of the speedy in-memory database.

The platform, dubbed River, comes with a specialized programming language for implementing data models, business logic and other specifications in machine-readable form. Delivered as part of the latest HANA service pack, it’s accessible via an early adoption program open to developers throughout the US, Europe and Asia.

Dr. Vishal Sikka, a member of the SAP Executive Board who played an instrumental role in the development of HANA as the company’s CTO, said in a statement that “the extraordinary power of SAP HANA gives us an opportunity to totally rethink the developer experience. We are very proud to release SAP River today, a key first step toward reimagining and dramatically simplifying the experience of application development.”

Continuing on the cloud theme, SAP announced that it’s releasing River in conjunction with a HANA service broker for Cloud Foundry, a free platform-as-a-service solution that was originally developed by VMware and spun off into Pivotal earlier this week. The extension is available for download from GitHub along with a new Node.js connector and OpenUI5, an open source (and slimmed down) version of the company’s proprietary SAPUI5 framework for HTML5. The toolkit packs prebuilt layout themes, control libraries and other features meant to “help provide a consistent end-to-end experience and foster [code] reuse and efficiency,” SAP said.

In yet another gesture towards enterprise application developers, the vendor unified “all major platforms and technologies“ under a single license designed to cut red tape and let engineers focus on their work.