SAP S/4HANA is a replacement to the SAP R/3 or Business Suite platforms that have been in place in many global businesses since the release of SAP R/3 in 1992.
The important thing about the SAP S/4HANA launch is that it clearly lays down SAP’s software strategy for the next 10 years. The launch is done in parallel with a Capital Markets day, which means that SAP is looking to immediately explain the impact to investors and customers.
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. 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.
SAP is committing all of it’s development resource to rewriting some 400m lines of code – so this is the most strategic development decision in SAP’s 40-year history.
With S/4HANA, SAP is rewriting the software layer to take advantage of the tremendous performance of SAP HANA, which leads to a dramatic simplification of the data model and software. Data size is reduced 10:1 and even the number of database tables is reduced 10:1 in many areas.
In addition, several decades of experience have been used to simplify the user experience with the SAP Fiori UX front end, with a modern user experience and fewer screens and clicks.