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With the advent of cutting edge technology innovations from SAP, the SAP ecosystem has also turned into an intricate landscape – offering undoubtedly extremely rewarding and satisfying career paths.
The newest technology innovations from SAP include SAP HANA, SAP S/4 HANA, SAP BW/4 HANA, SAP Business Suite, etc. In this article from LearnSAP, we will try to clear the air around these offerings from SAP and help you identify and develop the most suited SAP career paths for you.
In a nutshell - SAP HANA is a database, an in-memory database, while SAP S/4HANA is an application which is designed to run on the SAP HANA database. It is a revolutionary platform-based in the company's new In-memory database.
Learning it will imply that choosing to pursue a career path that is both fulfilling and exciting to work with. SAP HANA acts as a hub for all SAP's products strategy and it serves as the base for recent technology SAP S/4HANA that is set to serve as a cornerstone for all SAP technologies. Deployable on-premise or in the cloud, SAP HANA is the in-memory computing platform that lets you accelerate business processes, deliver more business intelligence, and simplify your IT environment. By providing the foundation for all your data needs, SAP HANA removes the burden of maintaining separate legacy systems and siloed data, so you can run live and make better business decisions in the new digital economy.
As an SAP managed services leader, we see a lot of confusion around SAP’s core offerings. SAP's complex and rapidly evolving product portfolio combine with inconsistent naming conventions to create a landscape that’s hard for non-technical stakeholders to navigate. Here’s what you need to know about SAP ECC, HANA, S/4HANA, and Business Suite.
SAP HANA is an in-memory computing database designed to accelerate SAP applications and business processes. HANA design innovations such as in-memory operation and a simplified data structure improve performance, leading to higher productivity, real-time visibility and better use of analytics. For example, companies can react to market conditions based on up-to-the-minute data, rather than relying on the last quarterly reports. This is possible only because SAP HANA can do real-time analytics, crunching data nearly instantaneously. This allows businesses to react more quickly to changing conditions, providing significant strategic benefits.
HANA is the back-end that runs the SAP landscape. Its central feature is an innovative, column-based Relational Database Management System (RDBMS), which is used to store, retrieve and process data on core business activities. SAP HANA itself doesn’t determine what sorts of tasks a business does, it can accommodate any type of data. Businesses install applications that run on top of HANA, such as SAP applications for finance, HR, and logistics. As such, companies have to make choices about what software best meets their current needs.
Unlike other RDBMS's SAP, HANA reduces the memory usage factor by 10 and improving performance as it uses column-oriented storage which combines OLAP and OLTP into a single structure. The speed of both Online Transaction Processing (OLTP) and Online Analytical Processing (OLAP) can be drastically changed with the design of SAP HANA.
Information of the majority databases is stored on the hard drive which in result keeps an only limited amount of information in main memory. Hard drives are relatively slow, which limits how fast they can recall information.
SAP HANA is made up of a simpler structure and lower memory footprint than other RDBMSs. A system like OLAP and OLTP are stored in different databases which result in insufficient memory, redundant information bloating the DB footprint
SAP HANA is not just a new choice for enterprise computing; because it handles data very differently from other databases, it is designed to run SAP software. SAP has been reworking their core ERP applications to better harness HANA’s speed and flexibility, and will only support older versions of the software until 2025, at which point customers need to have completed their SAP HANA migration, and upgraded to the new software.
SAP S/4HANA replaces SAP business suites with a simplified tool called SAP HANA.
SAP rebuilt their ERP solution (SAP ECC) from the ground up to take advantage of HANA's performance and innovative data models. SAP S/4HANA provides an award-winning UX (SAP Fiori) along with a host of application and uses case-specific benefits.
SAP S/4HANA is the shorter form of SAP Business Suite 4 SAP HANA, which means it is the fourth version of SAP Business Suite. It is designed to run only on SAP HANA as the database. The transition of SAP users to SAP S/4HANA is similar to the earlier transition from the ERP versions, SAP R/2 to SAP R/3.
The next generation Business Suite of SAP is SAP S/4HANA which is designed in a simplified way specifically to work with SAP HANA and to replace the SAP ECC/ERP.
SAP S/4HANA is the in-memory version of the Business Suite ERP platform. SAP S/4HANA was announced in February 2015 and billed as SAP's "most important release in 23 years", S/4HANA is intended to be easier to use and administer by helping to solve more complex problems and handle vastly larger amounts of data than its predecessors. S/4HANA is available in on-premises, cloud and hybrid deployment models.
As per the SAP, developers feel the changes in SAP as they find ERP system is more agile, simpler to understand and use. This change is termed as the opportunity for businesses to reinvent business models and re-generate revenues with the advantage of the Internet of Things (IoT) and big data by connecting people business networks and devices by the SAP.
Batch processing is not required for S/4HANA this makes the businesses to simplify their processes and drive them in real time which means that the business user can access insight on data from anywhere in real time for prediction, execution, planning, and simulation.
SAP Simple Finance is one of the main components of S/4HANA, which aims to streamline financial processes and enable real-time analysis of financial data. Simple Finance helps companies align their financial and non-financial data into what SAP refers to as a "single source of truth." Some Business Suite users are deploying Simple Finance as the first step in the road to S/4HANA.
S4HANA is based around the core ECC, however, there are major differences:
Either by a system conversion from an ECC solution (including Suite on HANA) or a new install, the route to S/4HANA is achieved. From ECC6 to S/4HANA there is no upgrade path.
S/4 HANA is the next generation business suite built by SAP. It effectively replaces both the ERP and the BI. Contrary to the R/3 and the ECC 5 and ECC6, it dilutes the line between the application layer and the database layer as it only works on HANA. S/4 has two huge advantages on ECC 6: real-time analytics and reduction in the data-footprint, as it takes advantage of the whole power of HANA.
Both solutions effectively marked a major swift in SAP Strategy, as up to ECC 6, SAP was a software manufacturer, collaborating closely with another software manufacturer, each excelling (in theory) in its own, such as Oracle or IBM. With the advent of HANA and S/4, this collaboration, already strained by Oracle getting into the ERP market with its business suite, went to bullocks and has made its dent in the revenue of Oracle.
The other swift in SAP strategy is the fact that brings some if not all the different SAP solutions under one umbrella: SRM, SCM, EWM, BI, and ERP are integrated or in integration process under S/4.
Finally, the third swift has been the Cloudification of the SAP portfolio, as S/4 has two offerings: On-Premises and Cloud.
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