Over the next few weeks in the run up to Sapphire, SAP and partners will be talking plenty about the recently announced S4. S stands for simple, and 4 for fourth generation – as CEO Bill McDermott has pointed out it has been 23 years since R/3 was introduced.
But will it be truly simple? When will SAP industry solutions become part of S4? When will new acquired products like SuccessFactors and Ariba? How will non-SAP, non-HANA apps integrate? Will the HANA cloud data center scale to 000s of customers? How messy will be managing on-premise, private and public cloud instances? So many questions need answering.
And will S4 deliver the economies we have seen in the last two decades by way of cloud infrastructures, mobile apps, telepresence, SaaS upgrades, crowdsourcing and open source technology? The SAP economy is extremely inefficient today and runs at over $ 200 billion a year as the book SAP Nation describes.
Use the book to become smarter as you evaluate S4. Also learn how many of your peer SAP customers have already begun their own simplification journeys without waiting for SAP - 30+ C level executives describe their experiences. Their insights will allow to evaluate S4 better against emerging application, database and cloud infrastructure options in the marketplace. Many of the book case studies describe their savings, agility and speed improvements as they leverage Plex, Hadoop, Kenandy, Workday, NetSuite, UNIT4, Rimini Street, Infor with AWS and many other new technologies that have emerged in the last few years.
And in the spirit of better economics that any S4 discussion should be focused on, I am pleased to announce Amazon has a 20% discount starting tomorrow for the next week on the Kindle version of the book. Click on the badge on left for the amazon.com site and here for the UK site. On the other European sites, the pricing was not increased even though a 20% + VAT went into effect January 1.
Enjoy the discount and I look forward to a spirited discussion around S4 over the next few weeks.
