Let me share some insights on SAP S/4 HANA Cloud solutions that promises the speed of innovation and simplicity. From the ton of discussions I had with partners, experts and customers during various TechEd events in the last months, I can safely say that markets are increasingly shifting towards cloud.
In fact, according to the collective opinion of business analysts and market research, 42% of the future Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) will soon be cloud based. Businesses are gradually moving towards cloud and they are retiring their usual quadrants for ERP cloud quadrants. It’s not only the analysts’ perception, but also the c-level of clients that have their heads on cloud and we at SAP together with our entire ecosystem are geared up to guide our customers all the way to the public cloud. We are able to support complicated processes with the help of Platform as a Service (PaaS) using which we can extend what we currently have.
Especially the public cloud offering basically allows us to do what our customers are teaching us - the Line of Business (LoB) approach and Simplicity at its max. In today’s world, the consumption pattern in the public cloud is transitioning from the LoB approach, be it marketing or running projects or optimizing your finance department for example towards a best of suite.
For example, S/4HANA Finance cloud is one of the latest innovation that we have launched because financial departments are looking to replace their legacy with public cloud solutions, but it goes beyond the finance function for sure already We are also noticing a certain consumption pattern like the Two- tier ERP wherein a headquarter may have a Business suite or S/4HANA solution but the subsidiaries may prefer a public cloud solution for their LoBs. This is a growing trend and S/4HANA supports this well because of a well-fit semantic compatibility between S/4HANA and a S/4HANA cloud – unique in the industry.
This blog would be incomplete without the mention of the Hana cloud Platform (HCP), SAP’s PaaS offering that helps customers to integrate different applications for efficient functioning of business processes. HCP is the proven cloud platform that enables businesses to rapidly develop new applications or extend the existing ones. We have proven it ourselves, and partners are doing as we speak even more. Our PaaS gives a lot of openness to customers/partners so that they can build their apps while they consume SAP’s standardized public cloud offering like Enterprise Management, Marketing, professional service, Finance, and manufacturing cloud.
While businesses consume innovation, they will also expect a lot of open APIs so that they can successfully integrate the third party solutions. Check out the growing array of API´s on the hub, and the roadmap showing you the hundreds to come in the next quarters.
So, what does all these mean for us as technology experts from an enterprise architecture point? Well, it means that SAP experts need to familiarize themselves with new technologies like for example Core Data services or SAP Fiori and HCP – now.
Let me end this blog with my outlook on cloud– I think the cloud will not only accelerate but will also be open for business to take large clients with complex system into the public cloud. On the other side, there will be certain things that we can do because of being on the cloud like machine based learning concepts and artificial intelligence – earlier, faster and better. There is a conceptual upsurge of Intelligent Services which can be a glue between SAP and non-SAP, and also provide support in easy consumption of machine learning.
Check out this video for more: https://www.facebook.com/HANAbySAP/videos/1323704974319993/
I would love to know what questions you have about S/4 Cloud and SAP HANA cloud platform. Let me know in the comments. I’ll be writing more about this new solution in the weeks ahead.
Meanwhile, learn about the different capabilities of the HANA Cloud Platform from Holger Mueller here. Follow us via #S4HANA and myself via @SDenecken.
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