SAP S/4HANA, the next-generation business suite is addressing the impact of complexity that enterprises are struggling with and is designed to help them run simple. An area where customers dramatically experience this complexity is the initial implementation. Getting started quickly with brand new innovations like SAP S/4HANA might sound difficult, but this is where SAP Activate comes into place. SAP Activate expedites SAP S/4HANA implementations throughout the customer lifecycle by offering ready-to-run digitized business and technology processes, guided configuration and next-generation methodology. SAP Activate builds on accelerators like SAP Best Practices that help customers get up and running quickly with pre-configured best practice scenarios and functionalities, followed up with continuous updates as new enhancements become available. The SAP S/4HANA, on-premise edition, is designed for businesses of all sizes, in all industries, that need deep and broad functionality combined with a high degree of flexibility.

Some smaller customers say that the hardware costs are prohibitive. SAP S/4HANA strictly runs on standard Intel x86 servers or now on IBM POWER servers as well. The data footprint reduction can reach a factor 10+, where the columnar store is responsible for a factor 5 and the removal of aggregates and the reorganization of transient data tables add at least another factor 2. We recommend a split of transactional data into actual and historical partitions. The extent for how long you keep data in the historical partition online depends on the type of business.

There are many advantages to deploy the system in the cloud, but if regional preferences call for an implementation on premise — no problem, it might be just a different cost factor. It has to be understood that the deployment in the cloud has a principal advantage when it comes to the implementation of new functionality. SAP offers a test migration of SAP ECC 6.0 systems in the cloud and the customer can later decide where to run the production system.

SAP HANA Cloud Platform is an in-memory cloud platform based on open standards. It provides access to a feature-rich, easy-to-use development environment in the cloud. The platform includes a comprehensive set of services for integration, enterprise mobility, collaboration, and analytics SAP HANA Cloud Platform enables customers and partners to rapidly build, deploy, and manage cloud-based enterprise applications that complement and extend your SAP or non-SAP solutions, either on-premise or on-demand. As a Platform-as-a-Service operated by SAP, our product frees you from any infrastructure and IT costs and offers state-of-the art quality of service - availability, scalability, multitenancy.