Introduction

SAP doesn’t make it easy to stay up to date with what they call their products, the version numbers they give them and how long they will be supported for. New products are introduced fairly often these days, which would be hard enough to keep track of, but they also tend to rename existing ones on a regular basis. Sometimes what looks new isn’t at all, so I thought I’d summarize some of the interesting things I have deciphered recently.

SAP, HANA & Cloud

The group of products whose names contain the words ‘SAP’, ‘HANA’ and ‘Cloud’ is definitely the most confusing for me: there is a big difference between HANA Enterprise Cloud, HANA Cloud Platform, HANA Cloud Services and S/4 HANA Cloud, for example. Here’s a summary of the main product categories:

But what do all those ‘as a Service’ labels mean? XaaS is a commonly-used catch-all for ‘as a Service’ products – a category that includes the kind of SaaS (Software), PaaS (Platform), DBaaS (Database) and IaaS (Infrastructure) products listed above. Here’s a handy summary from Gartner:

_IaaS vs SaaS vs PaaS: What’s the Difference | _ gartner.com

Which Edition of S/4HANA?

S/4HANA has been a pretty dynamic product since it was introduced and the product names have reflected that fact. Sometimes it feels like they change every couple of months or so. At the time of writing we’ve just had another refresh, so here’s how the high-level S/4HANA product names stand in June 2020:

• SAP S/4HANA On Premise – The “traditional” version of SAP S/4HANA software. Customize to your hearts content and run wherever you want. It could be hosted “On Premise” in your own data center, you might for your own Virtual Private Cloud (probably provided to you by your SI) or you could run it on one of the IaaS offerings designed for S/4 HANA by ‘hyperscalers’ like AWS, Microsoft and Google;
• SAP S/4HANA Private Cloud – A specific combination of the on-premise edition of S/4HANA and SAP’s IaaS offering, the HANA Enterprise Cloud (HEC);
• SAP S/4HANA Cloud extended edition (previously called Single Tenant Edition) – A SaaS offering delivered by SAP. Fewer required upgrades than Essentials Edition but more extensibility options. Restricted IMG and no modifications of SAP code;
• SAP S/4HANA Cloud essentials edition (previously called Multi Tenant Edition) – The S/4HANA SaaS offering which has the least amount of flexibility. More suited to small businesses or those that can be run with totally ‘out of the box’ processes.

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