SAP enhances its cloud menu with new pricing, genome processing, and more

European business software giant SAP fleshed out its cloud offering today with a new pricing structure and some new services.

Now SAP customers can pay a “base price” to use the company’s HANA cloud platform, then pay more as they add features like predictive analytics and spatial processing, according to a press release.

SAP also added features to its Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) for building and deploying apps in the cloud. And it announced a cloud-based “Genomic Analyzer” app to let researchers process genomic data in real time. SAP expects this to drastically shorten the amount of time genetics researchers have to wait in order to get the insights they seek.

That’s all well and good for SAP customers, but Amazon Web Services continues to run away with the public-cloud market. Nor is Amazon the only significant competition: Microsoft and IBM have been on the move, too.

Meanwhile, SAP isn’t exactly the developer favorite for deploying workloads. DigitalOcean is attracting a lot more developer interest for deploying applications in the cloud these days.

Given all that competitive pressure, SAP will need to keep working on its cloud — with an eye toward simplicity and extensive feature sets — if it intends to pull in bigger revenues in the cloud market.