German business software maker SAP announced that is it is boosting its Southwest Asia strategy, and will be offering SAP HANA on the Cisco Unified Computing System (UCS) server platform for customers in Malaysia. The big data analytics trend is expanding on a global scale following the lad of the consumer data boom, and demand is beginning to show worldwide.

“Our mutual customers have found that optimised, responsive, and real-time analytics, in the changing market conditions of today, are required to keep their businesses agile and competitive,” said Anne Abraham, managing director of Cisco in Malaysia at the Cisco Summit Malaysia 2011.

Tim Moylan, President of Southeast Asia at SAP noted the importance of business analytics for all companies. Further, in a release the two companies citied the Cisco Connected Technology World Report: Part III, Data Centre and a Gartner report, which concluded that the Asia Pacific business intelligence platform market will grow to $819 million by 2014.

SAP is very keen on making partnerships a part of its business strategy, and one of the most recent ones, centering around big data analytics and HANA, was its team-up with HP. Announced at the SAP SAPhire 2011 conference held a few weeks ago, the two companies unveiled of two new integrated offerings designed for financial customers.

In addition to making global partnerships, another approach SAP is taking is investing in its venture arm. SAP Ventures participated in OpenX’s $20 million funding round – an online ad management company that challenges Google’s DoubleClick, the most prominent offering on the market today.

Among some other companies that raised funding recently is Alpine Labs, a developer of a cross-platform in-database analytics solution. In its first round of funding, it has secured $7.5 million from Sierra Ventures, Mission Ventures and Sumitomo Corporation Equity Asia Limited.