E3 Category: The opinion of the SAP community

How do German SMEs manage their IT licenses? What opportunities does professional license management offer? And which trend should companies not miss?

The advantage of an R/3 is, among other things, the freedom to choose the server, operating system and database. Anyone who has mastered combinatorics knows immediately that this results in countless system variants. No easy problem for the support team in Walldorf.

Industry 4.0 is slowly finding its place in the internal discussions of companies. What should the solutions look like and how can they be integrated into existing systems? The advantage currently lies with those who can act more quickly and purposefully without the ballast of grown IT architectures.

What would the world be without inventions? Innovations such as a revolutionary payment app or a toilet with smartphone control are supposed to make our lives easier. In the digital silent toilet, however, control was via Bluetooth protocol with a stored fixed PIN - an easy game for hackers! What if it was an insulin pump worn on the body?

Anyone who tests is a coward, I heard again from a customer just last week. In this context, we wanted to define a test concept for a major requirement of a department. Normally, IT departments are only concerned with the topic of test management during SAP release changes or, in particular, enhancement package upgrades.

Naturally, disaster was programmed: Sapviertel (S/4Hana) is a disruptive technology that hides behind a barrier called Compatibility View. For the users, appearances are to be kept.

From the SAP community for the SAP community. Orientation for us! From the monolithic R/3, a successful ERP landscape has emerged that encompasses everything from on-premise to cloud computing to on-demand and from social media to e-commerce to Business Suite.a

Digitization is changing our world. The Internet and modern technologies are shaping private life and, above all, the business world.

The end of the year should end on a conciliatory note. Time to tidy up the desk. Perhaps also to take stock of the year. We held a workshop with analysts from Gartner to review our SAP licenses. Looking back, amazing things happened in the community.

Life is change. Of course, double-entry bookkeeping was invented in Italy. Standard business software was first developed in Germany by SAP and Nixdorf. But the USA has more Nobel Prize winners in economics.

The recently released SLES 11 SP 3 for SAP Applications provides users with a number of innovations - including Hana-centric features. The following is an overview of the most important new Linux operating system platform features.

When looking for a personal application scenario or business case for the use of big data, there is a danger that companies will hastily shelve the topic for themselves. This is because social media is usually cited as the first source of data for big data analyses, and many do not see any added value in this data source. But there are numerous other...

Enterprise computing without open source is like a fish without water. In SAP deployment, Linux has established itself as the operating system platform. And as a cloud platform, Openstack is considered mainstream. But what is Openstack all about? Why is Suse pushing the spread of Openstack for enterprise computing? And: How does Openstack relate to SAP?

The SAP community wellness strategy comes to an end. Storm clouds are gathering. Oracle and SAP terminate the JDK support contract. SAP becomes in breach of contract with IBM regarding the provision of DB2 Blu. And Hana has its first CIO casualties. Things are looking bad for Hasso, Bill and Vishal's project.

Whistleblower Edward Snowden has opened the world's eyes and brought us the certainty: our data is not private, the NSA reads along. Information about us, our companies, businesses, paths, relationships - it's all being collected and analyzed. Many of us are unintentionally open books, exposing innovations, ideas, entire business processes. Is the world now falling...

If you look at the top topic list of various market watchers, Big Data and Cloud Computing are right at the top. What is important in the implementation of big data and cloud in the SAP environment from an infrastructure perspective? What fits together and how? What role do Suse Cloud, Hana and Hadoop play?

Chaos and panic reign at SAP. Our beloved Walldorf-based company is in trouble. After Business ByDesign, the company is squandering its objective advantage for a second time. Hana is in intensive care.

Business process management - BPM for short - is not only on the 2013 corporate agenda for 70 percent of DACH companies, but is also considered a crucial success factor for ensuring agility, productivity and efficiency in the company. I would like to show you below what contribution BPM can make to your company and which trends you should consider on your 2014 agenda.

Every year it's clean up, then celebrate. Before my CIO barbecue, I clean the house with my wife and children. I discovered a few things and was able to fuel the discussion about Jim Snabe once again.

With the Hana Enterprise Cloud Announcement at the beginning of May, SAP continues to consistently implement its cloud strategy and at the same time accelerates Hana penetration. Suse underpins the SAP Hana Enterprise Cloud with a sophisticated platform in which several components come into play.

The quantity of announcements from Walldorf has declined. SAP is becoming more and more a normal international company, with its advantages and disadvantages. When Jim Hagemann Snabe announced his retirement from the SAP Executive Board a few weeks ago, it gave us more insight into how SAP is managed. But it was also cause for many to look at...

In the case of a Unix-Linux migration and a one-to-one transfer of the Unix-SAP architecture, the database licensing costs can explode due to the high number of Intel cores. This can be countered by using a layer model.

Schadenfreude is not an honorable virtue. When I read the reports on Spiegel Online about the Prism spying program of the U.S. NSA (National Security Agency), I had to think of all my critics: Why doesn't this CIO dare to go into the cloud? He who laughs last laughs best.

Companies today no longer want to be tied to just one software provider, not even SAP. They want to use the software that offers them the best functions at the lowest cost, whether it runs in the cloud or on their own servers (on-premise).

Now it's here, the Hana Enterprise Cloud. Editor-in-chief Färbinger forced me to watch the recording of the Plattner/Sikka presentation from Palo Alto. I was horrified! Now SAP has finally become an American show company of sales and marketing. It's high time I went to Walldorf to see what's going on.

SAP Cloud Computing hits the ground running. Did you know that the SAP Cloud Enabler LVM is historically derived from the Adaptive Computing Controller, ACC for short - whose initial implementation took place on Suse Linux at the turn of the millennium? It's worth taking a look back to sharpen your view ahead.

Cluster - to some ears, the term sounds like a relic from years long gone. Why would we still need something like that in the age of cloud and virtualization?

Presumably, Hana diffusion is happening faster than many had thought. In the BW environment, it is almost common practice to replace classic systems with Hana. Suse is helping to underpin the success of SAP in-memory technology as a kind of SAP application completer.

I was pleased to read this sentence on Spiegel Online, where a report holds Microsoft partly responsible for the crash of the PC market. One of my deputies has had a Lenovo notebook with Windows 8 since the beginning of this year - I haven't heard the good man swear so much in years. What sounds funny is a serious problem:...

You have to understand, make ten out of one, let the license go, and make Hana the same, so SAP is rich, lose the R/3, out of hard and soft, that's what Jim says, make Suite on Hana, that's it, and ERP is one, and BW is none, that's Walldorf 101. (Freely adapted from Goethe)

Thousands of trade visitors, journalists, developers and executives travel to Hannover every year for the world's largest computer trade fair (we can safely disregard those onlookers who merely stock up on office supplies and sweets).

SAP Business ByDesign had a really tough start. First it took forever for the software announced by SAP to become available, then it was positioned with immense advertising effort - as far as I remember, there were even TV and cinema commercials and ads everywhere.

The short answer is SAP Note 1524246 - Relationship of licenses and business functions. The long answer starts in 2008 and could still cost us existing customers a lot of license fees, because EhP functions can become really expensive directly and indirectly.

Those who use Business Suite solutions - or the All-in-One midmarket solutions based on them - have always had freedom of choice when it comes to the operating system platform. For some time now, this option has also been available to Business One users. Thanks to SAP Hana, they can now enjoy the benefits of Linux.

"Hello, good old Europe! This is co-CEO Jim Snabe. I'm going to Palo Alto to get help!"