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.

Previous announcements from Oracle and EMC underline a move to new business models involving cloud computing and fast analysis of lots of data.

“We want to lower the costs to customers and bring them operational simplicity,” said Kevin Ichhpurani, the head of business development at SAP. The company has 3200 business customers using Hana, he said, and 1000 customers who run their business operations software on top of Hana, enabling near real-time awareness of things like supply chain operations and financial performance.

For VMware, the prospect of having more business software and analysis tools in its virtualization offering makes VMware more attractive to companies that are running their own cloud computing operations. Virtualization, which enables workloads to move across several computer servers, is a critical part of cloud computing. A VMware executive said early indications were that running the SAP products on VMware could save as much as 30 percent of normal costs. EMC has also published studies claiming that Hana on a cloud-based system can do analysis four times faster than on systems from Oracle, the leading enterprise software company.

The companies may indeed be looking out for their customers, but they are also looking out for themselves. VMware, which is majority owned by the data storage company EMC, has struggled in the face of other virtualization products and is looking for a way to sell by offering more features. SAP has scored impressive revenue with Hana, but it does so in the face of an eroding traditional market.

The Hana offering on VMware is initially at least limited to a terabyte of data. That used to be a lot, but has become commonplace now that we’re digitally logging almost everything.

Offerings from so-called “public clouds,” like AWS, which rent computing and software to companies, have become increasingly feature-rich. In addition, Oracle recently announced it would include a distribution of OpenStack, an open source cloud computing operating system, in its newest release of Solaris, its computer server software.

Perhaps not coincidentally, there is a big OpenStack conference this week. Also this week, EMC is having its own trade show. On Monday EMC announced at the show that it was buying Dssd, a company involved in a type of fast data storage that is good for real-time analysis, for an undisclosed sum.

Expect more such moves in the near future. When this many big moves start happening from a few giants, the others are likely to do something soon as well.