Accenture has been setting all sorts of records as of late.  A month ago it became the first company to launch a public cloud service based on Microsoft Azure, and now it’s flexing its R&D muscle at SAP SAPphire 2012.

One of the highlights of this week’s gathering is Accenture’s revelation of its intentions to carry out a massive commitment to the HANA in-memory analytics platform and the surrounding ecosystem.  This investment will cover the training of 1,000 IT professionals, who will be converted to a separate workforce dedicated to SAP database tech by the end of this year.

Once Accenture builds up the right talent pool, it will start offering new tools and services to HANA customers, and  those will be distributed via the company’s network of Innovation Centers.

“We’re ramping up the next phase of research and development in our Innovation Centers because we believe the new in-memory technology featured in SAP HANA can drive significant benefits for our clients,” said Mark Willford, global managing director of SAP business for Accenture, who then continued to detail the various advantages of the big data offering and added, “we’re pleased to be the first global SI to make a significant commitment to build on the new platform.”

There’s a lot of innovation going on in the big data space, and HANA is one emerging name in that’s managed to see a tremendous amount of growth in the past 12 months. Our recap from earlier looked back at how the first major adoption of the platform was soon followed by several others, global expansion, and increasingly big milestones along the way. The latest one can be credited to Accenture, and HANA’s unofficial anniversary this week made this particular update even more notable.