Also connected with SAP S/4 Hana

PBS Manager Professor Detlev Steinbinder asked, "Who is already using SAP S/4 Hana productively?" The answer given by the 100 or so participants at the PBS Info Day opening keynote, held together with Managing Director Gernot Reichling, was telling. Looking around the auditorium, everyone's nonverbal answer was obvious: no show of hands.

Asked about the result in the aftermath of the keynote, Steinbinder explained that he was "didn't really surprise", and said:

"However, practically all SAP customers, including the company representatives here at this year's PBS Info Day, are working on the S/4 transition. Due to the not entirely few innovations that the changeover to S/4 Hana brings with it, both on the application and process side as well as infrastructure-related, the SAP classic S/4 changeover is taking a little longer than expected.

You take the time you think is necessary to implement and use a well-functioning S/4 system that is aligned with your needs. Especially since SAP's target is still to support the Business Suite or SAP Classic by 2025."

The long-standing provider of SAP add-on solutions for data archiving, data management, nearline storage and nearline analytic infrastructure (NAI), for information lifecycle management as well as audit-proof data storage, data extraction and system decommissioning has been geared towards S/4, Hana and Hana-based SAP applications for some time now. According to the company, the PBS SAP add-on solutions provided for SAP Classic are "S/4-ready", so to speak.

In this context, it is not only about the actual PBS solutions such as Archive Add-ons, NAI, Content Link, Enterprise Content Store, Operational Analytics for ERP or the PBS tools for analysis, validation and authorization checks with the S/4 deployment, "but also about the use of our SAP complementary solutions in or with SAP Fiori, the new user interface or the specified UI design principles, provided for the business suite technology successor S/4," as Managing Director Reichling explained.

Reichling is involved in the PBS Fiori developments and presented a kind of water status report. According to this, PBS has already worked through three Fiori topic areas, namely PBS transactions for SAP GUI in S/4 Hana, PBS transactions for SAP Fiori Launchpad and own PBS UI5 apps.

Another topic, according to Reichling, is SAP Fiori Element App with access to legacy data, which the company is working on intensively and which could be used by PBS customers in the medium term. Live demos of PBS solutions in seamless interaction with SAP Fiori rounded off his presentation.

As is well known, Hana data management or the management of data used in different ways or in/with Hana is an important aspect for SAP users; especially for users with large data volumes.

Frequently used data, which changes more or less constantly, is then also mostly kept in memory or in the main memory or processed directly there (top level). For moderate changes, the principle of persistent memory comes into play (below).

And for data with virtually no changes, SAP has recently started using Hana Data Lake in conjunction with SAP IQ (again, below). Whereas data management at the very top generates the most costs, levels below it generate fewer.

PBS manager Steinbinder additionally directed the participants of this year's Info Day to this type of "data pyramid", presented by SAP company founder and supervisory board chairman Professor Hasso Plattner within the SAP customer event Sapphire in Orlando in May of this year.

The background to this is that PBS has been using the column-based database Sybase IQ, now SAP IQ, for years, even before the acquisition of Sybase by SAP.

"SAP IQ has always been used by us for the PBS Nearline Analytic Infrastructure, which is used by large retailers to analyze very large data volumes in the double-digit TB range, for example for the analysis of cash register receipts, in addition to IBM DB2 and SQL Server as further options. We are pleased about this and of course it confirms that we backed the right horse years ago, so to speak."