Thomas Saueressig - SAP S/4HANA Cloud: The Official Introduction

Never has the need for business agility and insight been more clearly demonstrated than in the past few years. Health crises, increasing extreme weather events, and natural disasters have also been a powerful reminder to us all that we have to protect our fragile planet.

At SAP, our promise is to innovate to help our customers run at their best. SAP is committed to helping every customer become a best-run business. This is not a slogan. This is who we are as a company. ERP has long enabled organizations to manage their finance and material resources. Now it must support these organizations in developing and delivering products and services in a sustainable way.

Technology has become an enabler of innovation. The power of cloud computing enables complex business networks to form, adjust, reform, and perform. Similarly, we must look at the cloud not as a technology, but as a mindset. The companies that have pivoted crises successfully, for example during the COVID-19 pandemic, did so by leveraging cloud technologies that enabled them to do things that would previously have been impossible.

A business is made up of people, processes, and technology. True business transformation requires changes in all three. Intelligent enterprises are more agile, resilient, and sustainable. They use insights into their business processes to identify how to automate, integrate, and optimize. They use data from across global business networks to identify new markets and new ways of doing business, and to ensure that their business activities are sustainable.

In 2021, we launched RISE with SAP, an offering that includes products, processes, and services to help our customers transform their businesses. SAP S/4HANA Cloud is at the core of this. With SAP S/4HANA Cloud, companies can grow, optimize, and transform on their own terms, while providing for the smooth integration of all business processes.

SAP S/4HANA Cloud is based on a modular architecture. This enables enterprises to standardize those business capabilities that are non-differentiating. It uses standardized industry-leading best practices to improve efficiency and quality. Highly automated processes reduce errors, redundancies, and variances and pave the way to operational excellence. Standardization and multitenancy mean that switching to the cloud reduces the total cost of ownership (TCO) and frees up resources to focus on value-added innovations.

While it delivers fast time to value, standardization alone is not sufficient. Extensibility is key to the differentiation of business processes. SAP S/4HANA Cloud offers both user and developer extensibility. Users can adapt the user interface, custom business objects, and the business logic in a low-code/no-code environment. Developers can implement differentiating capabilities directly in the ABAP environment for SAP S/4HANA Cloud or using various programming languages on SAP Business Technology Platform (SAP BTP). In this way, customers can maintain agility. With such extensibility options for SAP S/4HANA Cloud, customers no longer need to choose between innovation and standardization, but can pursue both while safeguarding their need for flexibility.