The days of monolithic business intelligence (BI) software are coming to an end, and SAP is doing everything within its power to escape the death spiral. The German firm is diversifying beyond its legacy revenue streams with a fast-expanding portfolio of cloud applications underpinned by HANA, a speedy in-memory database that has itself been available as a standalone service for a few months now.

Since launching the hosted version, SAP rolled out a web-based development environment called River that lets customers build their own apps on top of the platform using a purpose-built language for implementing data models and business logic. The vendor this week hit another milestone in its ongoing journey to productize the HANA stack with the announcement of a streamlined pricing scheme that allows users to purchase a subscription for a fixed base rate and add premium features such as predictive analytics and spatial processing as needed. The update comes weeks after a similar move by Hadoop distributor Cloudera and highlights the industry-wide trend towards making Big Data more consumable to organizations of different sizes.

“Today, we are simplifying access and expanding the market reach for SAP’s breakthrough SAP HANA platform,” noted Dr. Vishal Sikka, a member of SAP’s executive board who helped lead the development of the platform as CTO.

Besides simplifying pricing, SAP also introduced a marketplace that makes it easier for customers to buy cloud resources and features “hundreds” of HANA-powered apps. Among the most recent additions to the catalog is Genomic Analyzer, a tool that enables medical researchers to analyze large volumes of data in near real time.

“With these steps, customers and partners can experience the power of SAP HANA and build amazing applications in any way they choose to chart new frontiers in cloud-based software without compromise,” Sikka said.

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