In an interview to Forbes, Sanjay Poonen, president and corporate officer of SAP Global Solutions, laid out his company’s vision for big data analytics. That vision is based mostly on HANA, the business software maker’s in-memory data muncher.

SAP’s strategy involved the convergence of three well-defined big data concepts: the economics that can be achieved by adding agility to the analytics process, empowering the user; analytics and the extraction of insight at scale; and lastly, the use of this insight in both internal and outbound decision making.   What SAP is proposing is to mold these three categories into a single framework, which simplifies the analysis of all the flowing through the enterprise: whether structured, unstructured or transactional.

“Our view is that SAP HANA is breaking down the artificial boundary between transactional and analytical data processing with a single data foundation for managing enterprise data. There is an increasing convergence of transactional data and analytical data, to support the ‘3V’ characteristics of big data – volume, velocity and variety,” said Poonen.

This would all be accomplished using HANA, resulting in a great deal of abstraction. SAP is already working on getting its other apps to run directly on top of the analytics platform. There’s already a cloud-based version of the solution offered by the company, and it will soon be integrated with SAP Business by Design.  Quite clearly, the cloud plays a big role in SAP’s plans for its platform, mainly when it comes to adding that agility.

SAP is one of several traditional vendors that have been focusing on analytics in the cloud, and the firm is doing some exploring in area much closer to the end user as well. Last month it said it would resell NetApp’s media analytics-as-a-service, and today it participated in the $53 million series D funding round of Lithium, a provider of social media analytics.