A Bird's Eye View of SAP ERP Products


SAP (Systeme, Anwendungen, Produkte in der Datenverarbeitung) is the world’s largest provider of enterprise application software. SAP was founded by a number of ex-IBM employees in the early 1970s.

SAP has a large portfolio of applications. There have been six key versions of its main enterprise resource planning (ERP) products, roughly a major iteration each decade.
During the 2000s the number of processes covered by the R/3 or ERP was continuously increased, in addition to that, a number of additional applications were launched to provide more advanced capabilities in certain areas. SAP started to package a number of these together under the name, “Business Suite”. 
The main components of Business Suite are:
* ERP (enterprise resource planning), basically the evolution of R/3
* CRM (customer relationship management)
* SCM (supply chain management)
* PLM (product lifecycle management)
* SRM (supplier relationship management)

SAP S/4HANA (SAP Business Suite 4 SAP HANA) is the current enterprise management solution specific to SAP HANA. It is the successor of SAP R/3, ERP, ECC. It can’t be correctly called either a technical upgrade or a functional enhancement, it’s a combination of the two.

SAP HANA is an in-memory database.
The three main building blocks of S/4HANA are:  
* The HANA platform (or HANA database) – a new database that solves the problems faced by ERP;
* S/4HANA (i.e. the HANA business suite) – an updated version of business suite 7 taking advantage of the benefits of the HANA platform;
* Fiori – a new approach to UI with more focus on flexible app style development and mobile.

One of the main objectives of Fiori is to allow developers to quickly create ‘apps’ as an interface for specific activities or tasks within SAP. These apps can feature improved visual design, role-specific actions and be adaptable between desktop, tablet and mobile etc.

SAP NetWeaver Application Server (AS) is the integration and development platform for SAP applications.

SAP Business Suite applications, SAP NetWeaver Business Warehouse (BW), Portal, and Process Integration and Orchestration (PI/PO) are components of the SAP NetWeaver platform.

BASIS is the original kernel of SAP R/3.

SAP BW/4HANA is a business warehouse (BW) solution specific to SAP HANA.

SAP HANA Cloud is a container-based managed database service (DBaaS).

SAP Analytics Cloud is a managed service for analytics (SaaS).

SAP Data Warehouse Cloud is a managed data warehouse service (SaaS) that extends the SAP HANA Data Warehouse and SAP BW/4HANA on-premise solutions.

SAP Cloud Platform (SCP) is a platform-as-a-service (PaaS). The platform services are hosted from three environments: Neo, Cloud Foundry, and ABAP.

ABAP or Advanced Business Application Programming or Allgemeiner Berichts-Aufbereitungs-Prozessor is a programming language developed by SAP for the development of business applications in the SAP environment (as defined in the documentation).

The SAP SuccessFactors HXM Suite is an evolved, cloud-based human resources management system (HRMS) with a focus on engagement and experiences.

SAP HANA Enterprise Cloud (HEC) is a private cloud service for hosting SAP (HANA) applications: Infrastructure + Managed Services + Subscriptions or BYOL (Bring-Your-Own-License).

SAPPHIRE NOW is SAP’s annual business conference for users and partners usually held in Orlando Florida.  

SAP launched the “Embrace” project at SAPPHIRE NOW 2019 to promote migration to hyperscaler clouds - Amazon Web Services, Microsoft Azure, Google Cloud (2018), Alibaba Cloud (2019), and IBM (private) Cloud (2019)

HANA stands for Hasso’s New Architecture. Hasso Plattner is one of the five founders of SAP.

Microsoft offers the free e-book SAP on Azure Implementation Guide [PDF], that can help in architecting your SAP environment on Azure

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