SAP S/4HANA

SAP has announced it is launching a new version of its ERP software, the biggest launch in the company’s history.  And it runs on Cloud HANA with Fiori.

http://www.computerdealernews.com/news/sap-re-imagines-its-business-suite-with-s4-hana/39665

http://www.zdnet.com/article/sap-revamps-business-suite-with-new-ui-hana-analytics/

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2015/02/03/sap_hana_bet_biggest_thing_20_years/

At first I thought S/4 was some sort of partnership with HANA on Amazon S3, or perhaps an Audi on HANA.  Unfortunate naming, though like HANA (upper-case it!) the name or acronym doesn’t really matter. 

What does matter is the fact that this offering cements the fact that there are two code branches for SAP ERP, Cloud-based HANA and Server-based Oracle-and-every-other-db-except-HANA.  I wonder which one is going to get attention within SAP?

According to The Register article above, HANA is “only” deployed to 1.4% of SAP customers as of August 2014.  Of course, they have 253,000 customers or so….

In 2014, SAP will focus on helping its customers “simplify everything, so they can do anything.”  (on HANA)

I have a strong feeling 2015 SAP TechEd is going to be all about the ERPers and S/4HANA, just like it was all about HANA and Fiori a couple years ago.

S/4 is built on the SAP Fiori Design which includes those Metro live tiles found in Windows 8 with a couple hundred other functional controls.  The power of Fiori is its consistency and responsive design when dealing with mobile apps.

DJ Adams has a good writeup about the various SAP UI flavours.  This should give a bit of a (nice?) jolt to someone who has been using the legacy SAP UI.

And HANA can run an entire 700GB enterprise dataset on a 16GB iPhone.  Recently I ported a table from SQL to HANA.  HANA mushed up this 700MB 98% redundant wide SQL text dataset down to about 70MB which seems pretty efficient to me.  Plus, look ma, no indexes!

The real question is, will SAP S/4HANA run on Raspberry PI for free?