SAP announced its next big thing in FKOM and I am excited to be part of it: Business Suite 4 HANA or S4HANA.

The S is for Simple and the 4 is for the 4^th generation of SAP ERP: R/2, R/3, ERP, and S4HANA.

S4HANA is the successor of SAP Business Suite, built on SAP’s HANA platform. It comes with re-written code (no materialized aggregates) to leverage SAP HANA transactional and real-time analytical capabilities, delivered through a simplified and enhanced end-user interface based on SAP Fiori, available in the cloud and on premise.

Some takeaways from FKOM

Simplicity delivered with S4HANA:

– Based on cloud-first approach

– HTAP (hybrid transaction analytical processing) – a database that can support OLTP and OLAP without data replication

– HANA multi-tenancy – in the cloud or on premise

– No unnecessary indices, no aggregates – replaced by on-the-fly calculations, thanks to an in-memory database

– User interface is Fiori based

– Maintains ERP core data models

Real benefits:

– Reduced data footprint – highly compressed data, less tables

– Higher table throughput – fewer table updates, less locking, faster processing

– More Flexible – complexity is reduced as indices and aggregates are removed

SAP’s new cloud-based business models are disrupting the enterprise-software industry – watch this space.