SAP’s (News - Alert) cloud business, as well as HANA and its mobile division, have been doing quite well for itself lately. As such, it’s now taking on a bigger challenge: A customer CRM application made to compete with Salesforce.com (News - Alert).

The SAP 360 Customer was recently announced as the first in a line of enterprise applications coupled with in-memory computing. It offers CRM application, Jam social software platform, Customer OnDemand cloud offering, and a variety of mobile solutions, making it a contender for the cloud CRM market that Salesforce.com currently controls.

This is also the first large-scale transactional system to run HANA. HANA is SAP’s in-memory analytics application, which is a large part of its strategy for the future. The product will eventually be a large part of SAP’s product line, featured in its core offerings, but for now, we’ll be able to see how well it works in the SAP 360 Customer.

This new offering may have an edge in its real-time information processing, as it analyzes internal and external data, providing insights into customer behavior almost immediately – a useful feature for many companies.

This is only the first of the Business Suite products and cloud-based EPM applications for SAP’s HANA platform. There are more on the way, with products for smartphones, tablets, and Windows 8 computers in the works, but the goal is to focus on the sales force.

While Salesforce.com may dominate the cloud-based CRM market, SAP may very well be able to compete. Not only is SAP 360 Customer the first large-scale transactional system to run HANA, which we’ll be seeing more of soon, but its real-time information processing will prove a very useful feature. Salesforce may need to watch out, since the SAP 360 Customer is looking good.

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