SAP To Offer HANA In-Memory Database as Cloud-Based Service

SAP this week said it will make its HANA in-memory database available as an enterprise cloud service. The move will allow customers to run the company's flagship ERP, CRM and NetWeaver Business Warehouse offerings as an elastic subscription-based Software as a Service (SaaS).

The company made the announcement in advance of its annual Sapphire NOW partner conference, to be held next week in Orlando, Fla. The SAP HANA Enterprise Cloud will enable petabyte scale, according to the company. In addition, the service will support the recently released SAP Business Suite, a portfolio of applications that use HANA as the underlying database.

SAP said it will allow its managed service provider partners to offer the service from their datacenters or leverage multiple datacenters worldwide. To be sure, the move isn't the first effort to bring SAP's in-memory database to the cloud. SAP made a big splash at Amazon Web Services' first-ever re:Invent partner conference last fall in Las Vegas. Amazon CTO pointed to SAP as a key partner at last month's AWS Summit, which kicked off in New York.

Yet while the two are partners, they're also competitors. At the same Las Vegas conference last year, AWS launched its own data warehouse alternative, called Redshift. Amazon also has a partnership with key SAP rival Oracle, as well as Microsoft.

IBM and SAP also inked a pact earlier this year to help their joint customers move legacy apps and those running HANA to IBM's SmartCloud Service.

Posted by Jeffrey Schwartz on 05/09/2013 at 12:49 PM