Linux does not stop at the entire middle class

Much of the focus on SAP is on the business suite successor S/4 Hana - rather less on the ERP midmarket solution SAP Business One, or B1 for short, for small and medium-sized enterprises. Yet the market penetration of B1 has developed splendidly over the years.

There are tens of thousands of installations worldwide. Numerous large companies or medium-sized companies similar to large companies also use Business One as part of their so-called hub-and-spoke strategy.

This means that either SAP Classic or S/4 is used at the company headquarters and B1 at branches or subsidiaries, with the advantageous coupling or integration of both SAP systems.

By the way, there are also a variety of B1 industry solutions with special industry-specific application functions, such as for the process industry, for the plastics industry, for machine builders, for the automotive industry or, or, or. Currently B1 is available in version 9.3. Business One Cloud solutions are also offered.

Tangible advantages

Of course, SAP Business One is not spared the "Hanaization" and thus the use of Linux. The fact is that companies that rely on B1 are increasingly using Hana together with Suse SLES for SAP Applications.

According to Suse surveys, approximately 6,000 customers around the globe are currently using SAP Business One powered by SAP Hana with the SLES for SAP Applications operating system platform and are benefiting from the Hana-Suse-Linux-for-SAP-Applications combination.

Whereby - who does not know - B1 was the first SAP ERP solution ever to run the in-memory database Hana and the OS Suse Linux Enterprise Server including dedicated functions for mission critical deployment (even before BWoH, SoH, S/4, BW/4H and so on).

Medium-sized customers also appreciate the numerous innovations based on modern technologies in the form of sophisticated and extensive functions developed for the advantageous Hana Linux deployment by SAP and Suse in close cooperation since 1999.

For example, to simplify deployment of installations, minimize downtimes, increase high-availability, optimize performance, or simplify the management of SAP Hana systems. Or even to save costs.

Be they larger or smaller companies: The SME user group has practically the same requirements for a well-functioning, stable SAP system environment that can be expanded at any time as a company with corporate structures.

Except for the fact that the granularity of business processes in corporate groups is more granular and large SAP system environments have different infrastructure requirements in terms of the volume of data to be processed or the number of users.

Rising Linux penetration

SAP Business One powered by Hana in combination with Suse Linux Enterprise Server for SAP Applications runs perfectly even with several hundred users and the respective requirements are always supported as needed.

Incidentally, there are around 500 SAP channel partners in the global B1 market. Suse supports them in word and deed or works with them on customer projects. After all, SAP in the midmarket largely means that SAP partners are more or less the direct customer interface.

No question: Thanks to SAP, SAP channel partners and Suse, the further spread of Linux and thus of open source is also increasing in the midmarket, in both larger and smaller midmarket companies.