SAP S/4HANA Cloud: Revolutionizing the Next Generation
of Cloud ERP
SAP S/4HANA – the next generation
business suite for digital businesses
In a digital world, information
can be measured and made available across the globe instantaneously. Sailing on
the backwind of new technologies, this is a key enabler for redefining business
processes. Fundamentally, it means that a digital business needs to deliver on
the ubiquitous promise to truly serve a segment of one: The end consumer. The
whole value chain becomes a highly flexible organism to be run in real time –
it becomes a LIVE Business.
Since the launch of SAP S/4HANA
two years ago, it has firmly established itself as the next generation business
suite to support digital businesses. It has the ability to unite
enterprise-wide processes into a synergistic digital core. At the core of the
innovation with S/4HANA is the revolutionary in-memory capabilities of SAP HANA
that allows both transactional and analytical data to reside in one system,
which in turn provides our customers with the ability to analyze, report,
simulate and predict in real time, to make smarter and quicker business
decisions. In addition, with SAP Fiori we offer a role based user experience
that looks great and really delivers intelligence to the user in an intuitive.
Clearly, this has resonated well
with the market and S/4HANA now boasts over 5400 customers, making it the
fastest growing product SAP has launched.
SAP S/4HANA Cloud – the next
generation, intelligent ERP in the cloud
This brings me to SAP S/4HANA
Cloud, the Intelligent Cloud ERP offering from SAP and the announcement on Feb
9th at the SAP Capital Markets Day. At this event customers, partners and SAP executives
showcased the new S/4HANA Cloud solution from the trusted global leader in ERP.
S/4HANA Cloud is our ERP cloud offering that benefits from the same game
changing innovations we delivered with S/4HANA, but now via a SaaS delivery
model, all managed and delivered by SAP. SAP S/4HANA Cloud is the cloud
ERP solutions best suited for organizations with more than 1,500 employees, and
for subsidiaries and operational units of larger enterprises.
Why ERP Cloud and Why now?
Moving a company’s core to the Cloud
enables a fast deployment and decreases time to value. Additionally, it fosters
rapid innovation cycles and reduces TCO and TCI, matching a Fit to standard and
enabling agility in consumption. The end to end experience is at the heart of
it. But for customers and partners there are new rules of the game to adapt and
digitally transform as well. Technology induced innovation to change the
Corporate fundamentally goes along with business changing capabilities for each
Line of Business. Enterprise customers expect SAP to re-define, renovate and
innovate its core asset – ERP, and deliver it as a SaaS deployment model.
We have seen for some time clear
indicators that the market is shifting to consume ERP in the cloud and that
this is set to grow rapidly in the coming years. There is a significant amount
of evidence out there that points to the growth of the cloud, but for me there
are a number of leading indicators from the analyst firms that show how fast
things are moving. Most analyst firms predict up to 20% growth rates in the
next 24 months for the Cloud ERP market. According to the analysts, Finance is
leading the charge as the next LOB already shifting to a SaaS approach,
especially for more service centric companies.
We are confident that, using our
heritage, knowledge and expertise built up as the ERP market leader over
decades, and our leadership with S/4HANA supporting our customers managing
their digital transitions, we can support our customer’s journey to Cloud ERP.
What is different with S/4HANA Cloud,
a closer look…
It’s easy to imagine that a Cloud
ERP solution is simply a watered down version of a full blown ERP on premise
system, compromised in technology or ability in some way. With S/4HANA Cloud,
this is not the case. With end to end processes supporting finance, plan to
product, and order to cash and procure to pay we offer enterprise-ready
functionality for digital businesses.
However, more importantly S/4HANA
Cloud shares the same in-memory architecture as S/4HANA and so offers the same
benefits. With analytical and transactional data together in the same
system, you have the performance to run a truly “live” business, run on the fly
aggregations to slice and dice data to provide immediate insights based on real
time data. This provides the trusted information it needs to make fast
decisions across the business.