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SAP building a HANA monopoly?

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Sonal Desai
New Update

SAP is betting big on it’s recently released SAP S/4HANA, short for SAP Business Suite 4 SAP HANA, and the company’s next-generation business suite, for growth. In a tete-a-tete with CIOL, Paul Martin Marriott, Senior Vice President, Database and Analytics, SAP Asia, expands on the company’s plans for India. We bring you edited excerpts from the interview.

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What are the trends that will drive adoption of SAP S/4HANA?

Cloud, IoT and big data are largely driving S/4HANA adoption globally, and we see a similar trend in India.

As more and more platforms go on cloud, and organizations seek business outcomes, customers are looking for a single instance of SAP to run hundreds of their production plants.

Contextually, the SAP HANA cloud platform serves as an extension platform and agility layer. It is possible to build specific capabilities extending the scope of SAP S/4HANA by either integrating non-SAP functions or building your own capabilities. The cloud platform not only serves as the development platform but also as the runtime foundation for the developed solutions. The extensions built on the platform can run against both cloud and on-premise deployments of SAP S/4HANA.

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With regards to IoT, we are seeing demand from the manufacturing, logistics, travel and transportation verticals that are now bringing in data for business outcomes.

For instance the sensor data from ships to the port for real-time feeds is an important development toward the IoT adoption.

Thirdly, enterprises are using the predictive analysis engine to build best practices and define business outcomes, into the business process. This helps asset intense companies to bring-in real value to the business.

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These instances explain how SAP S/4HANA enables customer adoption, data model, user experience, decision making, business processes, and innovations such as Internet of Things, big data, business networks, and mobile-first) to help businesses run simple in a digital and networked world.

Eventually, we want all our customers on R3 business suites, who are migrating to S4 to completely come on HANA.

Majority of your customers using R3 or SAP HANA are on Oracle, SQL Server or DB2. Why should they leave a technologically-sound comfort zone?

You are right. But our internal studies show that the confidence of our customers on SAP HANA has increased dramatically, and our HANA business has grown in double digits in the last couple of years.

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Also, we have seen a significant drop in customers using Oracle, SQL Server, DB2 and the others. Net new customers with ERP on HANA have increased since 2012. While 2/3rd of SAP customers are still on Oracle, the net new customers are opting only HANA. So of the 1,000 customers that we have on HANA, more than 600 customers have moved some or the other application on our in-memory platform. We have definitely come a long way from 0 to 600 customers using SAP applications on HANA in the last few years.

How does this data reflect in your customer acquisition strategy?

Our customer acquisition strategy is simple; we are looking at both Brownfield and Greenfield customers.

While our initial target to move all our R3 customers migration to S4 on HANA, we are scouting opportunities in these 600 large accounts as well.

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We have already seen traction from some very large organizations in APAC. For instance, Parle Agro has completely moved its operations on HANA. Similarly, 165,000 users in Infosys are on SAP HANA. Abroad, more than 100,000 users in the Australian government are on SAP HANA.

Over a period of time, as we build more skills and methodology and develop best practices, we stop support for SAP S/4 HANA on Oracle.

Each new technology has its early adopters? Who is supporting your case for SAP S/4HANA?

Among existing customers, we are seeing growing interest from enterprises from small enterprises, mid-size as well as large enterprises.

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Opportunities are coming in the form of refresh cycles, data center migrations, challenges related to platform interoperability post mergers and acquisitions, and compliance and statutory requirements.

Clearly, the demand presently is from data and asset intensive verticals such as energy, banking and telecom.

What’s the roadmap for S/4HANA?

Our recently released SAP Simple Finance solution marked the first step in our SAP S/4HANA road map for customers. The solution has demonstrated the value of simplification (no indexes, no aggregates, and no redundancies) and instant insight in Finance SAP S/4HANA. The on-premise edition leverages the full scope of SAP accounting powered by SAP HANA included in SAP Simple Finance.

Next in line is SAP S/4HANA, an on-premise edition that supports current lines of business and industries. SAP S4/HANA, public cloud edition will be released by business scenario for specific languages, lines of business, and industries. The first industry currently planned is the professional services industry.

SAP S/4HANA, managed cloud edition, is planned to have a similar scope as the on-premise edition. For the first delivery we have planned solutions for core industries such as professional services, chemicals, consumer products, industrial machinery and components, life sciences, as well as transportation and logistics.

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