Business software maker SAP revealed SAP BusinessObjects Business Intelligence (BI) OnDemand this week at TechEd 2011 held in Bangalore India. The cloud analytics offering is powered by HANA, SAP’s real-time data analytics platform and one of the key initiatives it has embarked on recently.

“With SAP BusinessObjects BI OnDemand on SAP HANA, we are bringing real-time analytics with the breakthrough capabilities of SAP HANA — enabling complex analyses, plans and simulations on real-time data — together  with lower TCO, rapid time-to-value and beautiful end user experience of on-demand applications,” said Dr. Vishal Sikka, member of the SAP Executive Board, Technology and Innovation.”

This analytics-as-service offering with lower TCO, rapid time-to-value and beautiful end user experience of on-demand applications,” said Dr. Vishal Sikka, member of the SAP Executive Board, Technology and Innovation.”

This analytics-as-service offering can be deployed in minutes according to a press release, and process data from a broad spectrum of cloud and on-premise BI software. It reduces cost as well because it doesn’t require customers to enhance reporting in order to boost overall speed and performance.

The company demonstrated HANA during this year’s SAP Sapphire conference. SAP’s Sikka explained how important the new software is for the analytics firm, and the benefits of having the application store data in the memory of the app. The conference also hosted a number of other launches and announcements, including case studies of companies including Vodafone that utilize SAP applications.

Real-time analytics is a rapidly evolving trend, and as it gains momentum more and more players just on the bandwagon. Unexpectedly, Oracle is one of them as of Oracle OpenWorld 2011. CEO Larry Ellison unveiled what he called Exalytics, a NoSQL database that  comes with a Hadoop data loader. Alex Williams wrote up a post about  the new offering and compared it with HANA here. Oracle is probably not all that interested in investing in a field directly competing with its core business, but is rather looking to put its name up in the big data world.