The big incumbents in enterprise computing are doing a lot of keeping up with the times this month.

In the latest example, SAP AG of Germany, the world’s second-largest maker of business software, announced Tuesday that it was teaming with VMware, a maker of virtualization software, to offer both SAP software and its fast data analysis tool, Hana, as a cloud-based service. Instead of buying separate software packages and running them on dedicated servers, in other words, customers should be able to load their data and analyze it at a much lower cost, with a greater operational flexibility.