Introduction

The digital era offers exceptional opportunities for businesses, while also bringing formidable challenges. IT departments struggle to derive fresh insights from complex, isolated systems. SAP S/4HANA and BW/4HANA, as replacements for classic SAP Enterprise Resources Planning (ERP), SAP Business Warehouse (BW), and SAP Business Suite, address those concerns. SAP S/4HANA and BW/4HANA are enabled with real-time insights, machine learning, and AI, bringing corporate business data together with big data and the Internet of Things (IoT).

The challenge of enabling SAP applications to run in a digital economy requires more than a quick investment and switching the applications on and off. The majority of SAP customers need to maintain traditional SAP ERP and SAP BW systems running on storage-based databases, while transitioning to an SAP HANA in-memory database and making the ultimate move to SAP S/4HANA. While every organization’s path to transforming IT for SAP is unique, most have some common objectives, starting with sustaining and invigorating classic SAP deployments while migrating to SAP HANA and S/4HANA.

The following figure depicts this migraton path:

Figure 1.         Transforming IT for SAP

The purpose of this Ready Solution is to consolidate and simplify IT and to lower the total cost of ownership (TCO), while delivering increased performance and productivity by running traditional SAP ERP landcapes on infrastructure that is SAP HANA-certified.