Organizations around the world recognize that competing in a digital economy requires making insightful decisions based on real-time data. For many, this requires a complete reexamination of both their business processes and their infrastructure. Unlike technology overhauls from previous decades, however, today’s digital reinvention does not require an exorbitant upfront capital expense, nor does it necessitate stretching thin already-scarce resources. SAP HANA Enterprise Cloud — SAP’s single-tenant, private managed cloud offering — does the heavy lifting for any company that wants to shed complexity and create more business opportunities by migrating to a modern, digital platform. And, with SAP HANA Enterprise Cloud optimized for SAP S/4HANA — SAP’s next-generation business suite that delivers innovation, simplification, and significant cost optimization — companies no longer see SAP HANA Enterprise Cloud as just a bridge from on-premise to the cloud: It is now a bridge to a truly digital, real-time enterprise.

Helping Organizations Become Digital

SAP HANA Enterprise Cloud helps companies transform into digital enterprises by being purpose-built for SAP S/4HANA as the core, by having integration capabilities, and by offering flexible adoption options. SAP HANA Enterprise Cloud offers a clear, simple way to consume the simplified SAP S/4HANA architecture. SAP rewrote SAP S/4HANA from the ground up with a new, optimized code base, removing a significant number of objects and reducing data stores so that it can achieve the performance efficiencies possible with SAP HANA. This makes SAP S/4HANA a key component of a digital platform, and SAP HANA Enterprise Cloud provides an easy path to adoption. In addition to its built-in support for SAP S/4HANA, innovations within SAP HANA Enterprise Cloud itself — such as seamless integration with SAP HANA Cloud Platform and SAP HANA Cloud Integration — ensure that companies can shed complexity without sacrificing the enhancements that make them unique. This is important for the journey to becoming a digital enterprise; newly reimagined business processes and their associated applications require that a range of software and cloud services be orchestrated together. Digital companies running hybrid landscapes require the flexibility to move freely between systems. Finally, pre-packaged support and subscription models are available that can be tailored to a customer’s specific licensing and application support requirements. This enables customers to be up and running quickly with minimal business disruption. Companies can adopt SAP HANA Enterprise Cloud at a pace of their own choosing, providing the agility and ease of adoption necessary for digital transformation.

Optimizing Customized Business Processes

Efficient processes are critical to business performance and productivity, and SAP HANA Enterprise Cloud removes many of the traditional barriers — such as system maintenance, upgrades, customizations, and remediation — to process optimization. But what happens to a company’s uniquely customized business processes, which often cut to the very identity of the enterprise? How do you optimize these processes with SAP HANA Enterprise Cloud while preserving business-critical customizations? This is where the value of the seamless integration between SAP HANA Enterprise Cloud and SAP HANA Cloud Platform comes into play. This seamless integration means that companies can bring any existing system into SAP HANA Enterprise Cloud, remediate it to align with the SAP S/4HANA architecture without modifying the core, and use SAP HANA Cloud Platform as a native extension of their SAP HANA Enterprise Cloud solution to run modifications and extensions that support their unique business processes. Examples of these customizations include additional business flows, custom user interfaces, single sign-on, and interface languages — all of which could be put into SAP HANA Cloud Platform as an abstracted run-time extension cloud service while keeping the core SAP S/4HANA implementation intact. This significantly eases the path to innovation because the applications on the core business suite can be independently updated without concern about modifications every time there is a change.

Connecting Your Business Landscape

Integration between SAP HANA Enterprise Cloud and SAP HANA Cloud Platform is supported by SAP HANA Cloud Integration, which can be thought of as the glue that ties the two cloud services together. In addition, SAP HANA Cloud Integration supports a connection to third-party solutions — even those run by another cloud provider — for a simplified connection between SAP and non-SAP applications. Many SAP HANA Enterprise Cloud customers are using SAP HANA Cloud Integration to connect to modifications within their SAP SuccessFactors environment that were extended on SAP HANA Cloud Platform. For instance, a new mobile app with a customized user interface can be built and extended using SAP HANA Cloud Platform, and with SAP HANA Cloud Integration, can be seamlessly connected to data in SAP HANA Enterprise Cloud. This example shows how SAP HANA Enterprise Cloud has evolved since its launch. Originally positioned as an enabler for SAP HANA adoption, SAP HANA Enterprise Cloud provided a way for companies to consume SAP HANA without having to buy new hardware or allocate specialized skillsets. Today, with SAP HANA Cloud Platform and SAP HANA Cloud Integration, SAP HANA Enterprise Cloud is more about business continuity; it is a platform from which companies can run their entire business.

Knowing Your Options

With SAP HANA Enterprise Cloud and its support for SAP S/4HANA, customers have a two-for-one avenue toward digitally transforming their business — both shedding complexity by migrating to a hybrid cloud environment and simplifying the architecture of mission-critical business suite applications by moving to the SAP S/4HANA core. Recognizing this value, customers are adopting SAP HANA Enterprise Cloud at a rapidly increasing rate — in the last 18 months, SAP HANA Enterprise Cloud customers have increased by 133%, with more than 450 customers running more than 1,300 SAP HANA instances, making it the largest in-memory cloud solution. Because the market is moving at such a frenetic pace, businesses need to act quickly or risk playing catch-up later. To help customers keep pace, SAP HANA Enterprise Cloud includes an option for prepackaged subscription models. An SAP ERP Financials customer that wants to move to SAP S/4HANA Finance, for example, can simply indicate the number of users and engage with the appropriate subscription model without having to undertake complex reengineering. Whether adopted as a prepackaged solution or not, SAP HANA Enterprise Cloud services include the ability to tailor a system to integrate with the company’s specific network requirements. This means that both existing on-premise legacy applications and net-new SAP HANA Enterprise Cloud applications have native integration with on-premise systems, ensuring little business disruption if a business process requires interfacing with an on-premise system.

The Time to Take Action

Don’t wait to take on your digital transformation: With SAP HANA Enterprise Cloud serving as a modern business platform to help get you there, the time to take action is now. For more, visit https://sap.com/hec.