SAP has shared details of its new S/4Hana suite, which is being dubbed the biggest launch in the company’s history, to customers in Johannesburg.
Rob Enslin, executive board member and president: global customer operations at SAP, says the company is poised to deliver the greatest of innovations to Africa and to its customers worldwide.
“With Hana, SAP embarked on a strategy to help businesses reduce complexity,” he explains. “It was initially introduced as an in-memory database but has since evolved into what we consider the greatest development platform in the history of IT.”
Hana has hit scale, Enslin says, and is today the fastest-growing database platform in the world – in fact, it is at the centre of everything that SAP does.
Last month, the company launched SAP Business Suite for Hana – S/4Hana.
“S/4Hana has been completely re-architected for simple,” Enslin says. “We believe Hana will fundamentally change everything we do for ERP going forward.”
Enslin stresses the S/4Hana is not simply an upgrade to the existing business suite, but is a completely re-engineered system.
SAP S/4HANA is designed to drive business innovation with simplicity by connecting people, devices and business networks in real time to support the development of new business models. It will also help accelerate the adoption to Internet of Things and Big Data. The simplified data model allows customers to reimagine their IT, helping to drive lower costs and aiming to help deliver IT efficiency.
Pfungwa Serima, CEO of SAP Africa, adds: “Providing our African customers with choice is of paramount importance. SAP S/4HANA will offer cloud, on-premise and hybrid deployment options to provide maximum choice to customers. Many African businesses are looking to extend their reach deeper into the continent and engage with their consumers in all channels. With SAP S/4HANA there is now an innovation platform designed to truly drive their growth.”
SAP S/4HANA extends the value of simplicity to all lines of business and industries. It does this with end-to-end 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.
The SAP Simple Finance solution, announced in June 2014, is already helping customers transform finance with instant insight and marked the first step in the SAP S/4HANA roadmap.
SAP S/4HANA will also expand the SAP portfolio of cloud solutions such as those from SAP companies Ariba, Fieldglass and SuccessFactors. The comprehensive offering will help allow customers to define their own pace to the cloud based on their needs while keeping all the integration and business benefits of their existing SAP solutions.
SAP has an established partner ecosystem that will resell and provide services for African customers along their journey to run simple with SAP S/4HANA. Partners and SAP are committing to provide an easy path for African customers to move to SAP S/4HANA with pre-defined migration and deployment packages for quick time to value.
