The deceptive package Hana & S/4

S/4 was presented by SAP at the New York Stock Exchange at the beginning of 2015 and to this day it is not clear what is behind this slash acronym.

Some believe that it is new ERP functions based on the in-memory computing database Hana. According to this, S/4 masters a little accounting (Simple Finance) and some logistics.

Because of Hana and new programming, what's running is running at breakneck speed. Technological progress is coming to accounting, making it possible to close accounts in record time. SAP has not yet revealed what is to be done with the time gained.

S/4, on the other hand, is supposed to be the new, simple ERP world, according to SAP CEO Bill McDermott. According to Bernd Leukert, SAP's Chief Technology Officer, all "old" SAP industry solutions are already S/4-certified.

What now? Is S/4 the new ERP of the 21st century or old wine in new bottles - in other words, an ERP/ECC 6.0 with Hana as the substructure and Fiori as the visual finery?

The deus ex machina is played by Professor Hasso Plattner himself: S/4 is revolutionary, but compatible with the R/3 past. The solution is called Hana: This database is not only a fancy in-memory computing specimen, but also a traditional SQL database.

Hana is a machine with many faces - snake heads - similar perhaps to the mythological mythological figure Medusa.

She was once bewitchingly beautiful. Then Medusa was surprised by Pallas Athena in the temple while making love to Poseidon. Athena was enraged, so she transformed Medusa into the monster with the snake's head, as which the world knows her.

This metamorphosis can also stand for Hana. Because once Hana was a beguilingly fast database and S/4 was supposed to be a lean, simple ERP system, today Hana is an all-consuming platform and S/4 is an unverifiable ERP.

Hana carries multiple database engines, of which the SQL engine is the most innocuous. There is a graph engine and several machines for managing row and column-oriented storage in the server's memory.

Added to this are functions for compression and decompression, text search and neural networks. The snake's head of Medusa is hardly an adequate explanation for Hana.

On closer inspection, S/4 contains the old ERP/ECC 6.0 core from S/7 (SAP Business Suite 7) - technically explainable because Hana is also a normal SQL database like Oracle and IBM DB2.

Existing SAP customers who want to use S/4 must first pay a contribution of 9,000 euros to Walldorf. Only Father Zeus, alias Professor Plattner, knows whether this will make S/4 the legal, technical and organizational successor to S/7.