What Makes SAP So Relevant?

[MattCzwi]

High-Level Summary

SAP customers will have to convert their SAP systems to SAP S/4HANA by 2027.² The majority of SAP S/4HANA systems will be deployed in the cloud at one of the top global hyperscalers (cloud providers).³ Fortinet is well-positioned to provide higher-level security for SAP systems. Fortinet secures the Intelligent Enterprise running SAP—by protecting all SAP data generated by edge devices, endpoint systems, users, AI, applications, databases, third-party systems in multi-cloud environments, and on-premises.

SAP is the world's largest provider of enterprise application software. SAP software is an integrated software suite that addresses needs from all areas and organizations within an enterprise. All SAP systems are mission-critical and demand no downtime.

SAP Software Is Mission-Critical

What drives customers to use SAP software? SAP software is an integrated software suite that addresses needs from all areas and organizations within an enterprise. SAP enhances the competitiveness of enterprises by modernizing and transforming processes into digital solutions. Implementations of SAP software can take between four months to several years. SAP systems are always business-critical, and most of the time, they also are mission-critical; thus, downtime is unacceptable. Customers can have dozens if not hundreds of SAP systems deployed.

SAP Is the Gorilla in the Enterprise Application Software Market

SAP is the world's largest provider of enterprise application software. Founded 1972 in Germany, SAP today is the largest European software company and delivers its business solutions to more than 400,000 customers worldwide. SAP Concur, SAP SuccessFactors, SAP Ariba, and several other smaller acquisitions are major drivers to SAP's cloud revenue today. While SAP Business Suite achieves the dominant part of SAP revenue, SAP S/4HANA is the successor of SAP Business Suite.

92% of the Forbes Global 2000 are SAP customers. 77% of the world’s transaction revenue touches an SAP system. SAP is the gorilla in the enterprise application software market with revenues of €27,6 bn in FY2019 and more than 100,000 employees.⁴

SAP S/4 and the Benefits of HANA

SAP S/4HANA is SAP's successor of SAP Business Suite. Based on a simplified data model, S/4HANA provides an immediate benefit to the line of business (LOB) by improving productivity. While S/4HANA offers faster and more flexible processes at significantly less IT costs, it sits at the core of enterprises to enable them to reach their next level of digital transformation by using embedded artificial intelligence, real-time analytics, and more

S/4HANA is an architectural redesign of SAP's traditional application architecture based on SAP R/3 from 1992. Although S/4HANA was developed to achieve maximum benefit of SAP HANA—High-Performance Analytical Appliance—it also supports traditional database management systems (DBMS) like Oracle, DB/2, MSSQL, Sybase, etc.

SAP HANA is an in-memory, column-oriented DBMS that allows real-time OLTP and OLAP operations in a single system, thus avoiding the need for additional data warehouse systems that enable data mining on OLTP data. Such data warehouse systems are not capable of screening real-time data. SAP HANA has that capability due to its ability to store data in-memory and in columns. Scale-out systems of

SAP HANA can span up to 16 nodes and hold up to 24 TB of data in-memory for a single SAP system

The Role of Cloud Providers

Major cloud providers like Amazon Web Services, Microsoft Azure, Google Cloud, Alibaba Cloud, and others offer dedicated services for SAP users. SAP can be deployed in their clouds to offload costs of running on-premises systems into the cloud and pay by OPEX instead of CAPEX. However, many customers will prefer a hybrid model, where the majority of SAP systems will run in the cloud and where dedicated production systems remain on-premises.

No matter which model is selected, the need for higher security for data of mission-critical systems is increasing as the attack surface shifts when moving to the cloud.⁵

SAP announced a Go-To-Market agreement in 2019 and renewed its strategic partnership with Microsoft - Project Embrace.⁶ Embrace provides Market-Approved Journeys (MAJ) to customers, giving them an easy path to upgrade their SAP systems to S/4HANA on Microsoft Azure. Microsoft also became a reseller of SAP Cloud Platform on Azure

Also, Google is heavily investing to take SAP customers to their Google Cloud. In June 2020, Google opened up a new data center in Frankfurt, Germany, that is planned to exclusively host SAP customers providing all the benefits of a cloud.⁷

Cloud providers make it easy to migrate SAP systems from on-premises to the cloud, promising lower TCO. Therefore, customers have to decide whether to continue deploying applications in their own data centers or move them to the cloud to free resources up for more innovative tasks, resulting in faster digital transformation and increased competitiveness for the enterprise. It is not an easy decision when considering that myriad network security solutions must be deployed.

What Drives the Market To Implement SAP S/4HANA

SAP announced that standard support for SAP Business Suite would end by 2027. By that date, all customers will have to be converted to SAP S/4HANA unless they prefer to pay a premium for their SAP support fees. Converting old systems to S/4HANA is not necessarily straightforward. This type of project requires careful planning and consulting expertise, as well as significant budget to execute in time

The majority of S/4HANA systems are expected to move to the cloud at one of the cloud providers mentioned in 4.5 above. Fortinet is well-positioned to provide a higher level of security for SAP systems. Fortinet secures the Intelligent Enterprise running SAP—by protecting all SAP data generated by edge devices, endpoint systems, users, AI, applications, databases, third-party systems in multi-cloud environments, and on-premises.