AP S/4HANA is a real-time enterprise resource management suite for digital business. It is built on our advanced in-memory platform, SAP HANA, and offers a personalised, consumer-grade user experience with SAP Fiori. Deployable in the cloud or on premise, SAP S/4HANA can drive instant value across all lines of business – no matter your industry or business size.
SAP S/4HANA (on-premise) releases are delivered every 11 months Version coding
· SAP Simple Finance 1503: March 2015
· SAP S/4HANA 1709: September 2017
SAP S/4HANA Cloud releases:
· SAP S/4HANA Cloud 1709: September 2017
SAP S/4HANA can be deployed on premises, in the cloud (private or public), or through a hybrid model that supports a variety of deployment scenarios.
There are various ways to get to S/4HANA, this depends on a customer’s starting point. For example, new implementation, system conversion, and landscape transformation.
- New implementation – This is a new implementation of SAP S/4HANA (green field): customers who are migrating from a non-SAP legacy system or from an SAP ERP system and implementing a fresh system that requires an initial data load. In this scenario, the SAP S/4HANA system is implemented, and master and transactional data are migrated from the legacy system, thus standard data migration tools and content has to be used.
- System conversion – This is a complete conversion of an existing SAP Business Suite system to SAP S/4HANA (lift & shift): customers who want to change their current SAP ERP system to SAP S/4HANA. This scenario is technically based on Software Update Manager (SUM) with Database Migration Option (DMO) in case the customer is not yet on SAP HANA as the underlying database.
- Landscape transformation – This is a consolidation of current regional SAP systems into one global SAP S/4HANA system or a split out of different parts of a system: customers who want to consolidate their landscape or carve out selected entities (such as a company code) or processes into a single SAP S/4HANA system.
The cloud editions are released quarterly. The on-premises edition has one new release per year, and receives additional functionality and corrections in the form of Feature Pack Stacks (FPS) or Service Pack Stacks (SPS) each quarter.
Traditional license and maintenance model is used for the SAP S/4HANA on-premise edition. For the SAP S/4HANA cloud edition the subscription base model is used.
As for SAP S/4HANA cloud editions we make a distinction between public and managed cloud editions. Public cloud editions covers specific business scenarios of lines of business and industries, whilst the managed editions address a similar business scope as the one of on-premise edition.
Customer owns and is in charge of all upgrades for the SAP S/4HANA on premise option. In the case of SAP S/4HANA cloud option, SAP provides and is in charge of upgrades.