SAP users still wrestling with business case for S/4HANA

https://www.theregister.com/2025/10/17/sap_s4hana_business_case/

by rntn • 9 months ago

18 11 9 months ago

alephnerd2• 9 months ago

(meta commentary)

Is it just me or has anyone else noticed that this HN account only posts articles from The Register on a daily basis and who's only comment history is providing archive links in a near automated fashion?

Based on their rate of posting and the near synchronized posting times a day, this account just does not feel like a good faith account.

Bjartr• 9 months ago

Their very long HN bio ends with

"PS: definitely not ElReg's aMfM"

alephnerd2• 9 months ago

Isn't that a breach of HN's rules? My understanding is HN cracks down on bots and bot-like behavior.

CharlesW• 9 months ago

FYI, you can report these to HN's intrepid mods at hn@ycombinator.com (which I've done on your behalf).

lolive2• 9 months ago

Ah ah. Those discussions plague my calendar. For the moment, as far as I am concerned, SAP is promoting in S4 their own ontology, aka SAP CDSViews, which creates a looooot of questions in our domain. Is an external DB supplier supposed to force you into its own core data model.

Just like if Oracle told you which tables you have the right, or not, to create.

thrownyourway2• 9 months ago

S4 != HANA DB

lolive2• 9 months ago

My point is more about the "Clean Core" strategy that SAP wants to promote. It is vastly fought internally, and the marketing of SAP, beyond the "believe us, it will be fantastic" fantasy, is not helping as their documentation and examples are really poor.

The joke we have internally is that they expect companies to hire expensive SAP clean core experts to evangelize about what clean core is. == hey guys, hire us so we will tell what your dataModel/ontology should be.

Another side comment:

I am not that much in those platform stuff [,more in the enterprise data], but from what i understand, HANA failed to deliver the performances expected, whereas the marketing was MASSIVE.

So people are now a bit skeptical about any new move by SAP.

jmclnx• 9 months ago

No kidding, where I worked (fortune 500) they started to move to HANA, that drove me out :)

At my age, I was done doing 24/7 that it would take to get it installed before S/3 licenses expired.

Last I heard the company was going to pay millions more to keep using S/3 because they realized HANA would not be active in time.

I do not know the status now, but I know cost in real $ will be an awful lot. The thing that is interesting with HANA you now need to use an SAP D/B, no more dog fooding using your database (oracle, DB/2 ...) which you sell to customers.

If I was in charge, I would go to SAP and say, unless we get huge relief on the cost, we will move to another ERP. I would have had this search active before looking at HANA.

ebiester• 9 months ago

I know Workday is working overtime on this. I’m sure Oracle and others are too.

SAP is giving companies a reason to switch and that’s always a scary moment.

thrownyourway2• 9 months ago

“ In the survey sponsored by enterprise application support provider Rimini Street” - Rimini Street specialize in supporting customers choosing to keep old software components running without a SAP contract

on_the_train• 9 months ago

I still don't understand what Hana actually is. But I'm very concerned that my company is apparently spending an astronomical amount to transfer our entire business to use it. We do lithography optics for heavens sake, why are these business problems so difficult that they take more money to solve than our technological challenges?

SAP users still wrestling with business case for S/4HANA

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