It’s Day 3 of SAP SAPphire, and today the BI software maker finally released the most significant batch of HANA-related news scheduled from the event:  HANA service pack 4.

The idea is that SAP customers can upgrade their deployment by purchasing service packs rather than new licenses, and this latest one packs more than enough marketability value.  First and foremost, the in-memory analytics appliance now features deep integration with Hadoop.

Users can access data stored in Hive and Hadoop directly from HANA and the Sybase IQ database, a capability made more powerful thanks to the addition of text data processing. Being able to carry out ‘linguistic analysis,’ as the company calls it, is meant to  improve the way clients are able to implement the enhanced version of HANA in their SAP environment.

“We are very excited to work with SAP to provide customers with real-time insights from their Hadoop environments using our complementary solutions,” said Mike Olson, co-founder and CEO, Cloudera. “The SAP real-time data platform, combined with the Cloudera Hadoop Distribution, will deliver unmatched capabilities in next-generation ‘big data’ applications and analytics to the enterprise.”

On top of the Hadoop integration the platform also supports the R statistical language, and for the first time it has been opened up to developers via a partnership with Amazon. AWS now features a pre-configured HANA instance that essentially provides the foundation for a data-driven cloud app, as well as a considerably broadened outlook for the technology itself.

Finally,  SAP announced eight new applications designed to supplement HANA and expand the core platform to more key areas in the enterprise.   These solutions aim to make the appliance accessible to the less technical user base, such as the SAP Collections Insight tool that lets sales reps design visualized profiles of clients.