BI software maker SAP is introducing a new product that will help businesses create custom predictive analytics models.

SAP Predictive Analysis can run as a standalone solution or in conjunction with HANA, the company’s increasingly popular database system. The new offering provides users with a relatively easy to use environment for collecting data, manipulating it, and displaying it in a readable format. The latter is enabled by native integration with SAP Visual Intelligence technology, a relatively new BusinessObjects solution that was originally designed to complement the company’s Explorer product line.

“We have been using business intelligence solutions from SAP to analyze our business and the adoption of SAP HANA has brought tangible benefits,” CIR CIO Luca Baccarini writes.  “We now need to predict, more accurately, the fluctuation of demand and the habits of clients to optimize sales cycles and employee allocation on different tasks. For this reason we chose SAP Predictive Analysis, which will allow us to reach these targets in a simple and integrated way.”

SAP is seeing a massive opportunity in big data, investing a great deal in R&D to realize its goals for this market.  Earlier this month the company had a major product announcement that covered new mobile applications, and more notably, two big HANA updates.  The first was the debut of Financials OnDemand, a cloud-based BI solution purpose built to aggregate accounting information. It relies on the in-memory analytics platform for real-time insights and metrics updating.

The second big update was that a new HANA patch is scheduled to launch in the coming months. SPS5 will add computability with SAP ERP and ease large-scale deployment, among other things.