SAP S4/HANA

Official release of the new generation ERP was finally announced on February 3, 2015. Called SAP Business Suite 4 SAP HANA (or, in short S4/HANA), is the fourth generation enterprise software suite, after R/2, R/3 and ERP - thus number 4. The 'S' stands actually not for SAP, only for 'Simple' .

We already embarked on this exciting journey a while ago, while getting in touch with the HANA capabilities being offered as part of the products existing so far, and representing not only a pure database, but also serving as an application part, as well as a user interface frontend.

It would be very interesting to get familiar with benchmarks, which will hopefully be released for the first focus areas - sFinanse and sLogistics - and compare them with the existing SAP applications which are already based on the HANA database.

What are the key advantages of this innovative step forward might be summarised as follows:
• Faster execution times – a few times
• Simplified Data Model - fewer table updates, less locking, faster processing, indices and aggregates are removed
• Reduced data footprint – highly compressed, less tables
• On-the-fly calculations, thanks to in-memory database
• HTAP (Hybrid Transaction Analytical Processing) – database that can support OLTP and OLAP without data replication
• New User Interfaces
• Simple configuration
• Large scale hardware options
• Reduction in database maintenance costs.