S/7 Hana or SoH

The SAP community has involuntarily and grudgingly taken note of the signs of the times: There is no way around Hana! A catastrophe is brewing because SAP has failed to do any due diligence with regard to the Users, IT decision-makers and management have been neglected. While SAP partners, CCC managers, base administrators and IT staff are now sufficiently knowledgeable about Hana, hardly any Hana knowledge has yet penetrated the business departments and management bodies.

As was demonstrated at last year's SAP TechEd in Barcelona many SAP decision-makers do not even know that Linux is needed as a basis. SAP's lack of educational work on Hana stringently explains the low adoption rate. Always talking about real-time and top speed, as ex-SAP CTO Vishal Sikka did, was counterproductive.

Always pulling new Hana tricks out of a hat, as SAP Chief Technology Officer Bernd Leukert does, is very entertaining, but no more convincing.

Real enlightenment, what S/4, Hana and HEC (Hana Enterprise Cloud) can do, is missing: What DSAG-members need in order to make a use of S/4 The most important factor in being able to weigh up the benefits is concrete information about which functions the solution covers. For 72 percent of the respondents DSAGmembers, this is the most important decision-making criterion: "The success of a ERP for customers will be decided by functionality. It is the key for digitization projects," explains the DSAG-Chairman of the Board Marco Lenck. "SAP is currently not providing enough of this information."

In the approximately 300-page SAP paper entitled "Simplification List for SAP S/4 Hana, on-premise edition 1511" there is only one concrete reference: S/4 is not the legal successor to Business Suite 7. Thus, all future User for a release upgrade from S/7 (ECC 6.0) to S/4 have to buy new licenses.

But in Marco Lenck's opinion, it cannot be right that SAP existing customers use their maintenance fees for years to finance the development of new ERP-software and end up charging SAP license fees for it. According to the DSAG is S/4 a software that is used as part of normal maintenance as a Upgrade must be available free of charge for a version change. SAP has other plans!

The catastrophe was already known somewhat cryptically at the end of last year, when PAC analyst Frank Niemann wrote in a research note that about one in three existing customers were planning, S/4 in the coming years, and almost 40 percent of them are making a fresh start. They want or need to completely rebuild their systems. A S/4-price list should be available before the CeBIT give

But even this step will not solve the paradox that, overall, existing customers tend to view S/4 as a path to better SAP applications. They are not aware of the potential for innovation in the direction of new processes and business models, according to research by Frank Niemann.

Thus, the conclusion is that S/7 Hana, i.e. SAP Business Suite on Hana, is the better choice. Even Professor Hasso Plattner explained in a blog post published at the end of last year that nothing currently comes close to the functionality of S/7. In addition, many organizations are concerned with optimizing their existing SAP landscapes, leaving little room or budget for them to implement a S/4 to lift.

PAC analyst Niemann thus correctly recognizes: What about Effort and to Costs for a S/4-The costs of the S/4 project for existing customers often cannot be quantified at this stage. In addition, users will have to purchase S/4 licenses and possibly also new hardware. Good arguments are needed to justify these investments in view of the SAP landscapes that already exist in the companies and the associated ongoing costs. Costs.

Time is pressing! 2025 is supposed to be the end of S/7, but Hana is not yet running smoothly. On page 86 of this issue, you can read where Hana is slower than an ECC 6.0 system on Any-DB. What happens to the numerous partner add-ons? When these are installed on S/4 need to be transferred, they should be tested in advance - but this could become unnecessary because hardly anyone is willing to pay for indirect use (NetWeaver Foundation for 3rd Party).

As a compromise, it could be possible that S/7 runs on Any-DB (Oracle, SQL-Server, MaxDB and IBM DB2) will remain in maintenance until 2030, but SoH - an S/7 on Hana - will be maintained until 2035. With currently about 100 operational S/4-installations, the class target was missed by far and growth rates are low. Thus, it seems perfectly justified that Professor Plattner is clearly concerned about his legacy in his blog entry.