Business software giant SAP AG announced a Platform-as-a-Service offering underpinned by HANA, its in-memory computing technology.

Like its competitors in the enterprise software space, including IBM, Oracle, Salesforce and Microsoft, the German company is going after the market for providing a streamlined way for developers to rapidly build and deploy enterprise applications.

The announcement comes about one week after IBM rolled out beta version of an enterprise PaaS called BlueMix, based on the open source Cloud Foundry PaaS technology. Oracle launched its PaaS offering in 2012, Microsoft's Windows Azure services have been around since 2008, and Salesforce has made Force.com into market leader in the eight years that the PaaS has been around.

There are also a few serious new contenders for enterprise PaaS market share, notably Google and EMC-owned Pivotal.

SAP's PaaS includes in-memory computing infrastructure, database and application services. Vishal Sikka, member of SAP's executive board who leads all product and innovation initiatives at the company, said HANA had two major advantages: deep understanding of the application workload and the underlying infrastructure.

Sikka and the company's chief marketing officer Jonathan Becher announced the new services during a webcast press conference Wednesday. In addition to the PaaS announcement, they also unveiled new -as-a-Service purchasing options for unbundled HANA database, a marketplace for SAP and other companies' HANA-powered applications and a new personalized-medicine technology called Genomic Analyzer.

Like its competitors, the company that has traditionally relied on software license sales is moving toward a very cloud-centric model and HANA is what is going to power its entire cloud software portfolio. “All applications from SAP will be in the cloud,” Becher said, adding that HANA will be the single unifying platform underneath all the applications.

A major advantage of SAP's PaaS for enterprise developers is access to the entire collection of application libraries inside HANA, which enables greater integration, Sikka said.

The entire programming model and application services are now inside HANA. “It has become a full platform,” he said.

Essentially, customers can now buy the HANA database, application services or in-memory compute infrastructure through the -as-a-Service model. These are available separately or together.