Today, SAP unveiled SAP Business Suite 4 SAP HANA (SAP S/4HANA). The new product is built on the in-memory platform SAP HANA and is designed leveraging the SAP Fiori user experience (UX) for mobile devices. The announcement was made at the SAP S/4HANA launch event at the New York Stock Exchange.
According to SAP, S/4HANA is the successor of SAP Business Suite, built on SAP’s HANA platform. The S stands for simple and the 4 represents the fourth generation of SAP ERP: R/2, R/3, ERP, and S4HANA.
"Today SAP is redefining the concept of enterprise resource planning for the 21st century. SAP S/4HANA is about uniting software and people to build businesses that run real-time, networked and simple," said Bill McDermott, CEO of SAP. "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 consumers 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."
The new suite is built only for SAP HANA and leverages the latest in-memory and real-time capabilities of SAP HANA, and according to the company, extends the value of simplicity to all lines of business and industries end-to-end with guided configuration for adoption, a modern user experience for business users of all roles in a company on almost any device, a simplified data model, on-the-fly insight at the highest level of granularity and re-imagined real-time business processes.
According to the vendor, in addition to leveraging the latest in-memory and real-time capabilities of SAP HANA, SAP S/4HANA accelerates the on ramp to Internet of Things and Big Data, drives innovation by connecting people, devices and business networks in real time, extends the value of simplicity to all lines of business and industries, will offer cloud, on-premise and hybrid deployment options to provide maximum choice to customers.