SAP's Plattner: How S/4Hana Simplifies ERP

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SAP customers have been hearing the company's "Hana offers dramatic simplification" yarn for more than four years. So what exactly changed with Tuesday's launch of Business Suite 4 SAP Hana, dubbed S/4Hana for short?

In a one-on-one interview with InformationWeek, SAP chairman and co-founder Hasso Plattner explained that all the advantages of Hana in-memory computing could not be realized with the SAP Business Suite of old. While the technical and performance improvements are compelling, the real questions for users center on the sub-applications of ERP (CRM, supply chain management, HR, project lifecycle, and management) that SAP will bring into S/4Hana, how soon the change will happen, and what industry-specialized capabilities it will offer.

To answer those questions, we have to first look at what's changed, and why the previous iterations of SAP Business Suite could not take full advantage of Hana's in-memory capabilities.

S/4Hana apps run without aggregates, indexes, materialized views, and multiple copies of data. The old SAP Business Suite required all that because it was designed to run on conventional databases that store all those interim views to spinning disks. Third-party databases including Microsoft SQL Server and Oracle have gained in-memory appendages, but they still maintain the aggregates and indexes of the past, creating yet more versions of the same data.

"The full benefits have not been there because the full data models [of the legacy apps] were still in the system," Plattner told InformationWeek. "Our own CFO had never worked on a system that operated without aggregates, so the idea of doing every single report and every P&L statement running through 250 million lines of data in memory scared him. S/4 Hana does this in less than two seconds."

[ Want more on this news? Read SAP S/4Hana: Big Bet On 'Simplified' ERP. ]

In getting rid of all of those copies of data, all of which required storage capacity and processing cycles to keep all those spinning plates running in sync, SAP was able to simplify and shrink the underlying data model of the ERP suite.

So, what does this mean for users seeking simplification of their ERP systems? Yesterday we reported one version of that roadmap from Wieland Schreiner, executive VP of S/4Hana. But SAP clearly didn't do a good job of presenting a clear, consistent, and comprehensive roadmap, because comments and questions remain.

Hasso Plattner's explanation of the simplification possible with S/4Hana's finance app: 593 GB reduced to 42 GB, with only 8.4 GB being dynamic, current-year data requiring high availability and backups.

"S/4Hana finally brings a native solution that can demonstrate in-memory computing's business value," wrote financial analyst Jason Maynard of Wells Fargo Securities in a research note. "That said, we still think a coherent application rewrite across the entire application portfolio is needed to truly usher in a modern cloud suite."

Maynard's assessment seems to allude to one big question as to whether acquired cloud apps, such as SuccessFactors and Ariba, will move into S/4Hana or whether those functions will be rewrites of Business Suite apps. Which app you use to run and account for HR expenses, for example, is obviously a big deal.

Some executives waffled on this question and told us SAP could have it both ways, using virtual views to carry forward legacy apps. Schreiner told InformationWeek that SAP will favor the cloud-based apps over redeveloping legacy Business Suite apps that handle the same functions. If Schreiner's

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