SAP is making its flagship Business Suite available as a service in an effort to pave a migration path to the public cloud for organizations with existing on-premise deployments of its software. The business intelligence giant didn’t specify when the new offering will launch or how much it will cost, but said that the bundle will be offered on a subscription basis, which is especially appealing to smaller companies that would be hard pressed to pay for licenses upfront.

SAP is moving its entire portfolio to the cloud, one product and the time. The firm introduced a hosted version of its HANA in-memory database back in mid-2013 and more recently consolidated its formidable library of training resources in the Ariba-powered online Learning Hub. The BusinessObjects suite and Rapid Deployment Solutions (RDS) catalog have been available on Amazon and other platforms since 2011.

The latest addition to the bunch, SAP Business Suite via the SAP HANA Enterprise Cloud, features all the apps in the standard edition, including the company’s hugely popular enterprise resource management (ERP) and customer, vendor, supply chain and product management solutions.

“Today is a significant step forward for SAP’s transformation, as we are not only emphasizing our commitment to the cloud with new subscription offerings for SAP HANA, we are also increasing the choice and simplicity to deploy SAP HANA,” said Dr. Vishal Sikka, a member of SAP’s executive board who had previously helped lead the development of the platform as CTO.

Consuming applications as a service instead of running them in-house has a number of obvious advantages, but when it comes to mission-critical processes like ERP, the challenges often outweigh the benefits. SAP promises to turn that paradigm on its head by hosting Business Suite in regional data centers so to enable customers to store data in their home jurisdictions. The company says that this model allows users avoid the added compliance risk associated with keeping business information in remote locations where different regulations may apply.

SAP currently operates 16 data centers worldwide, including two it established in Tokyo and Osaka on Monday. “We are expanding our global presence with a comprehensive in memory-centric data center plan, dramatically simplifying our customers’ IT landscapes,” Sikka said.