Author: Gottfried Welz, specialized journalist

Through markets and sales channels everywhere, tire dealer Pneuhage manages the multi-layered sale of tires and rims with highly digitalized processes. A central business integration data hub acts as a swinging wheel.

In general, the new major release 6.7 of Seeburger's Business Integration Suite (BIS) will be available from 2020. At the company's annual in-house exhibition in October, the relaunch was in the spotlight with five core topics.

The credo of the open source innovator Suse: to support SAP customers with the same solutions and functions both on-premises and in the cloud. No more, but also no less. The close ties between Suse and Microsoft at SAP on Azure have special features.

As part of its digitization strategy, Heidelberger Druckmaschinen has digitized the accounts payables process across the board internationally - right through to invoice posting in SAP and including workflow processing and exception handling.

As a provider of SAP add-on solutions for data management and information lifecycle management, PBS Software recently focused on its activities around S/4 Hana at its 19th Info Day. The auditorium's answer to a question about S/4 was quite enlightening.

SAP partner Oracle sees it as very likely that large customers in particular will continue to use their NetWeaver-based application systems after 2025. An E-3 exclusive interview with Gerhard Kuppler, VP SAP Alliances, Oracle.

Whereas in the event of a system failure at the University Medical Center Göttingen it took several hours for SAP applications to support business processes again, the systems have recently been restored in a matter of minutes using an innovative business continuity optimization concept.

Although SAP presented a licensing model for indirect use in April, it will be some time before all ambiguities are resolved and user companies have real clarity. An exclusive interview on the hot topic of licensing and "indirect" use with DSAG board member Andreas Oczko.

Archiving, management and analysis of SAP and external data have long been on the agenda for SAP managers in companies. The use of a Nearline Analytic Infrastructure (NAI) for fast, up-to-date data analysis promises further benefits.

Peri, a manufacturer of formwork and scaffolding, implements SAP system copy creation of SAP ERP ECC 6.0 and Hana-based applications uniformly with an automation solution.

New features in existing solutions were the focus of this year's PBS Software Information Day. So was a new development called PBS Operational Analytics for ERP (OA4ERP). The solution offering of the long-standing SAP partner is already in the starting blocks for S/4 and BW/4 Hana use.

There are quite a number of existing SAP customers who have had little to do with open source up to now. But without knowing it, they are indirectly using Linux, OpenStack, or Cloud Foundry.