SAP Big Data Bus Part Of Overall Effort To Build Developer Community

Big data is a catch-all term for describing any form of data analytics that requires the processing of data, be it by the gigabyte, terabyte or in the nose-bleed realm of petabyte-scale workloads. SAP’s big data push is embodied in a custom, decked-out tour bus that the company parked in front of TechCrunch Disrupt as part of its overall effort to promote its analytics offering and build out its developer community.

SAP is reshaping much of its technology direction with SAP HANA, an in-memory data-analytics technology that it is promoting to startups. The company has a HANA venture fund that it is using to invest in venture funds around the world. In an interview last month, SAP’s Kaustav Mitra, vice president of the startup focus program, said the program started last year and now has 550 participating companies, five times the number of startups compared to last year.

Now the company is funding developer events and giving out big checks to developers that build on the HANA platform.

Check out the video about the bus at the top of the post. There’s a bit of marketing in what SAP is doing, but the effort to be more developer-driven is a rare thing to see at big enterprise software shops.