Not just CIOs, S/4 HANA will interest CXOs: Ravi Chauhan, SAP India MD

SAP recently launched the most high-stakes overhaul of its core software line - the unified database platform S/4 HANA. Launching more than two decades after its predecessor R/3 was introduced, SAP’s aim is to convince multinational corporate customers that its software can now run their most critical business applications much faster. This new suite is built on their advanced in-memory platform, SAP HANA, and UI by SAP Fiori. Giving the users the choice of cloud, on-premise or deploying hybrid, SAP will surely look to take on pure cloud-based rivals Salesforce.com, Workday and Amazon.com’s Web unit. According to some analysts, SAP has staked out a big, early lead in the market for real-time business planning software by signing up a chunk of its biggest customers to S/4 HANA.

All major database vendors including Oracle, IBM, Microsoft, Pivotal and Teradata now offer “in-memory” versions and dozens of rivals supply predictive analytics software in the cloud. With the introduction of S4 HANA, SAP is looking to eventually bring all of its customers under one roof, a process that will entail further software development by SAP and complex decisions by customers about when it makes financial sense to convert organizational information from existing data formats. As Ray Wang, Principal Analyst and Founder of Constellation Research puts in his tweet: MyPOV: the real test on #s4hana adoption will be how @SAP treats its loyal maintenance paying customers on the upgrade. According to Ravi Chauhan, SAP India MD, what made S/4 HANA necessary was trends like IoT where traditional suites do not have the capability to handle scale and complexity. Secondly the SAP Fiora UI is for millenials who are today’s employees and used to UIs with the ‎user experience of Apple with the speed of Google. They also expect information and insights from applications with the same speed as Google provides and expect availability to be device agnostic (smartphone / tablet / wearables and desktop). Chauhan said there is no choice on the database front for those who use S/4 HANA. So, it will not run on Oracle and other databases because of the nature of HANA which is superfast, in-memory and because S/4 HANA is optimised for that. And till 2024 SAP has promised support and updates for those on the older R/3 suite. But clearly, the gap will widen and SAP seems to be saying if you want our best you have to be all-in. SAP is also looking to take S/4 out of the IT organization and pitch to the non-technology heads. For instance the Simple Finance application is one that CFOs should be very interested in. Clearly CIOs who work with a legacy mindset of being mere enablers aren’t those SAP will be talking to regarding S/4 HANA. “SAP’s campaign is about businesses running better with SAP and not IT running better. Today’s modern CIOs are business leaders and we will be speaking to CXOs and not just CIOs,” says Chauhan. Chauhan also confirmed that a managed cloud version would be launched in May, which should be around SAP’s mega Sapphire‎ event. With inputs from Reuters