As SAP Sapphire 2016 began its final day of the event, Professor Dr. Hasso Plattner, SAP SE cofounder and chairman of the SAP Supervisory Board, addressed conference attendees during a keynote to explain how the enterprise can work easily together with SAP to make their digital transition to S/4Hana. Along with his presentation, he brought out customers to provide insight into their experiences using the product.

Yesterday and today

Plattner began by talking about the technology of yesterday and the variety of platforms and systems it took to run a business. Relating a story about moving from the browser to the app, he said, “This is a very interring move. These are the mega moves.”

Again he provided some history on disparate legacy systems and how IT used to think. He said that SAP has been moving toward one database, one platform and one system over the past few years.

The future

Plattner then moved to the future platform — which he explained has a front-end browser — BusinessObjects Cloud, an integrated cloud-based analytics offering built for SaaS deployments, SAP Fiori, an app program, and then native cloud applications that include iOS/Apple. All of these now reside on top of S/4Hana along with Hana Cloud Platform, Business Warehouse, Digital Boardroom and other business support systems. Below this is the datastream, which Plattner asserted, “We can access any data in the world if we have the authorization to do so.”

He suggested redesigning the applications to be on Hana instead of for Hana. “If we eliminate all the name/space conflicts so we use the same term for a piece in the BW as we did  in the transactional part of the business suite, then we all of a sudden have a world where any piece of enterprise software SAP and available now in S/4Hana … all the applications we have built can all be mixed and matched,” he said

Reduced footprint and complexity

Plattner stated that this will allow you to cut the system into any configuration you like. Acknowledging that the enterprise has different uses, he also said that how you break it up depends on your company. He noted that SAP will build a “flurry” of new applications and that they are finally through the transition. “This is the future!” he stated.

Plattner estimated that the system is now half the size with half the complexity. He and his team ran through product demonstrations to show the ease of use for setup and monitoring. They explored all the analytics and business functionality and discussed machine learning, offering practical business examples of how S/4Hana can run with various applications.

Watch the keynote on demand to see the demonstrations and customer success stories. And be sure to check out more of SiliconANGLE and theCUBE’s coverage of SAP Sapphire 2016.

Photo from SAP Sapphire keynote presentation