SAP has recently announced a new cloud based application development platform, powered by HANA in-memory database. Named as NetWeaver Cloud, it is SAP’s very first platform-as-a-service, and is designed to complement SAP’s software-as-a-service offerings, such as Sales OnDemand, as well as its on-premise software.

“One component of the strategy, NetWeaver Cloud, is generally available now. NetWeaver Cloud provides native integration to SAP and other on-premises applications, identity management and single sign-on for access across cloud and on-premises applications,” said SAP.

Besides, the company also announced the availability of HANA on Amazon Web Services as a part of its HANA Cloud strategy, so that it can compete with the likes of Salesforce.com’s Force.com and Heroku platforms and keep its customers interested in cloud-based development within its product family.

The SAP HANA platform will help aggregate huge volumes of data and produce relevant results at lightning speeds. Giving his views on the same, executive board member and technology Chief Vishal Sikka said that the customers will be able to run SAP’s HANA cloud stack inside their own data centers as a private cloud. He even said that they are hoping to displace Oracle databases with HANA over time, as well as compete with Oracle’s Exadata database machines, which sounds as a really aggressive statement.

“SAP is now beginning work with Intel on a 10-petabyte HANA farm, and recently performed a benchmark on 1.2 trillion records’ worth of retail data with a 1-petabyte HANA system. Customers will soon be able to buy HANA machines from potentially many more companies as well, due to a new open certification program for HANA that SAP also announced Tuesday. Anybody who builds hardware can start to build hardware for HANA,” Sikka said.

SAP HANA is a premier product for the company and a part of its cloud strategy as well, and SAP has actually built many of the HANA systems in its data centers on its own.