German software giant SAP has just unveiled the next generation of its flagship Business Suite that’s married to its HANA in-memory database platform.

The new business suite, called SAP S/4Hana, is designed to bring HANA’s real-time intelligence capabalities to everywhere in the enterprise, on every kind of device. SAP is essentially combining its CRM, ERP, PLM, SCM and SRM technologies into a single system, which reduces its customers’ data footprint by a factor of 10 thanks to a new, massively simplified model. The suite is said to be compatible with any device, and organizations can choose from cloud, on-premise and hybrid deployment options.

“This is our biggest product launch in 23 years — maybe even in the history of SAP,” CEO Bill McDermott said at the New York Stock Exchange, where SAP announced the product. “You’re now seeing the real-time enterprise come to life.”

Without a doubt the biggest change – which also represents something of a gamble – is that SAP S/4 HANA only runs on its in-memory, column-oriented database HANA. By insisting on this SAP is snubbing the current data center trends that suggest best-of-breed hardware components and software are the simplest, most efficient way to refresh the data center.

HANA has been steadily evolving since its creation from a mix of technologies SAP acquired when it gobbled up companies like MaxDB, P*TIME and TREX. First launched in 2010, its now SAP’s major play in Big Data and counts some 235,500 customers at the last count. But HANA has been less popular in the cloud, where it’s used by just 3,600 customers according to SAP’s latest figures.

SAP is clearly trying to encourage greater adoption of HANA by tying it to its flagship product, and to help do so has written a public cloud version of the suite that’s compatible with multi-tenancy – which means it can securely run dozens of users on the same instances of SAP.

Besides incorporating HANA, SAP S/4Hana also utilizes a new data model that the firm insists can shrink a company’s data footprint by an impressive factor of 10. SAP has simplified its model so that data entry is three-to-seven times faster, because it no longer automatically updates data, instead being read-only on demand. According to the company, this should entice customers that wish to roll out cloud services as SAP S/4Hana runs faster and uses less disk space.

The suite is also highly versatile with a refreshed user interface that SAP says will work on any kind of device, be it desktop, smartphone or tablet. The UI is built using Fiori technology, and uses CSS and HTML5 to reach the SAP back-end via a SAP network gateway. SAP did note that not all of its apps are compatible with the new UI, though it intends to update those that don’t in the coming weeks and months.