Software company SAP has ventured into the Cloud platform as a service market as of October 16, 2012. SAP launched the first in a series of planned applications database services, which are based on cloud computing.
The service was announced at the annual TechEd conference in Las Vegas. The new services will allow for SAP to have a stronger presence in cloud computing, and will also open up new areas of competition in front of the other players such as Oracle and Salesforce.com.
With the latest announcement, SAP is now challenging the Heroku unit of Salesforce.com with a new java based cloud development platform known as the SAP NetWeaver Cloud. The new platform runs on Hana and its in-memory performance makes sure that it does not require ‘resource governors’; something that Vishal Sikka, the chief technology officer at SAP said that Salesforce.com routinely imposes on customers so as to keep up with the computing demands of cloud.
In terms of the database size, the vendor has launched SAP Hana One. Hana One will target companies who want to experiment with Hana to put up small scale in-memory applications on the cloud. Earlier, SAP offered free Hana developer licenses on AWS, but the loads were restricted to megabytes instead of gigabytes.
