What’s All This about SAP S/4HANA?

If you’re an SAP customer, you’ve surely heard of SAP S/4HANA by now, and the buzz has probably reached those who are just considering SAP enterprise applications. Whether you’re an SAP customer or not, knowing what’s happening could be vital for your business.

First, you have to know a little bit about SAP HANA, SAP’s in-memory database. SAP HANA transforms transactions, analytics and predictive and spatial processing so businesses can operate in real time. It allows you to simultaneously handle real-time trans­actions and analytic workloads with extreme speed. And because it’s such an improvement over traditional databases, SAP announced a few years ago that all its products will now be based on SAP HANA. This SAP Business Suite 4 SAP HANA (S/4HANA) is what people are talking about.

SAP has announced that it will extend support for its traditional enterprise resources planning solutions running on Oracle, Microsoft and other third-party databases through 2025. After that date, businesses will have to rely on SAP S/4HANA. That deadline is what’s driving the urgency behind migrations at organizations around the world.

I know that migrating any SAP system can be quite a big deal, so I feel for those IT teams in the trenches, trying to figure out how to make it all happen smoothly. And to make it go smoothly, there’s one other thing you have to understand about SAP HANA: It runs only on Linux.

For organizations that still rely on UNIX and for those who are traditionally a Microsoft-only shop, this can be frightening news. But it shouldn’t be. There are good reasons why SAP HANA runs on Linux and why it can be a simple and long-term sustainable move.

New business models that depend on mobility, cloud computing and Internet of Things devices are increasing complexity in the modern data center. That’s one reason for SAP’s move to standardize, simplify and innovate with open source technologies that run on Linux. Open source technologies are built to be interoperable by their very nature. Linux already leads enterprises’ shift to the cloud, so it’s a natural choice for many as they consider new databases and big-data systems.

And here at SUSE, we make the transition as painless as possible. SUSE^® Linux Enterprise Server for SAP Applications features an SAP system Installation Wizard, automated recovery for SAP HANA systems and other features that make it easier for you to take your first steps toward SAP S/4HANA. I’ll be explaining why SUSE is the smart choice for organizations facing a move to SAP S/4HANA in an upcoming blog.

For now, just know that the move to SAP S/4HANA has big implications. With SAP’s solution for transforming to a digital enterprise, you’ll be able to bring real-time speed to your entire organization and give it a nimble, superfast, data-crunching platform. And when you put it that way, there’s really only one question left: Why wait until 2025?