By Freya Purnell
SAP chose the New York Stock Exchange as the venue to launch its new SAP Business Suite 4 SAP HANA, which CEO Bill McDermott said is the company’s most important release in two decades, and redefines the concept of enterprise resource planning for the 21st century.
“When Hasso Plattner invented SAP HANA, we knew the day would come for SAP Business Suite to be reinvented for the digital age. At a moment when businesses around the world need to enter new markets and engage with their customers in any channel, there’s now an innovation platform designed to drive their growth. This is an historic day and we believe it marks the beginning of the end for the 20th century IT stack and all the complexity that came with it,” McDermott said.
SAP S/4HANA, as it is known, is a new product built natively up on the SAP HANA platform to take full advantage of its real-time, in-memory capabilities and incorporate the SAP Fiori user experience design principles.
With rewritten code and a simplified data model, SAP S/4HANA is designed to connect people, devices and business networks more simply in real time, supporting the development of new business models, and accelerating utilisation of the Internet of Things and big data. By “reimagining their IT” customers can also lower costs and achieve IT efficiencies, SAP said in a statement.
Available via cloud, on-premise and hybrid deployment options, S4/HANA’s first available module will be Simple Finance, followed by Simple Logistics later in 2015, and others to follow.
According to an FAQ on S/4HANA, written by John Appleby, SAP Mentor and global head of HANA at Bluefin Solutions, one of the most significant aspects of the launch is that it will only run on the HANA platform – a departure from SAP’s previous approach, under which SAP products where designed to run on database platforms from other vendors such as Oracle, Microsoft and IBM. SAP has also said that innovation will be focused on HANA-based solutions
SAP will be reselling S/4HANA via the partner ecosystem, with pre-defined migration and deployment packages. Its early adopter partners include Accenture, Capgemini, Deloitte Consulting, EY and PwC – a selection which suggests large enterprises will be the key target market for this new offering.
The Inside SAP Summer 14/15 edition will feature more on the launch of SAP S/4HANA and what it will mean for your organisation – subscribe here now to receive this edition.
