While the who’s who of the industry are at San Francisco’s Moscone Center for VMworld 2015, SAP SE is throwing an event of its own just over a over a mile away to introduce a new tool that promises to help organizations take better advantage of Apache Spark. The launch comes as the competition likewise moves to embrace the data crunching engine.

IBM Corp. pledged to invest a billion dollars into Spark earlier this year as part of an effort to push ahead in the analytics race that also will see several thousand of its engineers take an active role in the development of the underlying code base. One of the main reasons behind the company’s enthusiasm about the engine is its ability to handle real-time data like social activity and sensory transmissions.

That is owed to the fact Spark stores information in memory instead of shuffling bits and forth from disk before every operation, the same approach that IBM has taken with its DB2 database to provide speedy access to the records inside. The architecture also been adopted by SAP in its rivaling HANA platform, which in turn constitutes the lynchpin of its growth plans.

That’s where the German software titan’s newly introduced in-memory query engine comes into play. Vora, as the software is called, promises to provide a “HANA-like” experience for Spark complete with the former’s ad hoc analytics features, which allow users to quickly search their data for specific details.

That functionality can come useful in many of the applications where the open-source engine is currently finding the most use, from threat detection to infrastructure optimization. But one use case that stands out in particular is analyzing machine-generated data, which is also the focus of many of the other new services that SAP introduced at its event.

The HANA Cloud Platform now provides capabilities for handling communications among connected devices, managing those devices and pulling all the information being generated into the corporate backend for analysis. Complementing that functionality is an API service for controlling how such digital assets are accessed by applications both within and outside the organization.

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