New SAP/4HANA Release to Enable Greater Innovation and Flexibility

The competitive, commercial, and operational demands on companies are becoming intense

Apac CIOOutlook | Friday, October 07, 2022

By realising the factors to help customers become intelligent and sustainable organisations, SAP is launching a new solution that adapts to any enterprise’s unique needs.

FREMONT, CA: The competitive, commercial, and operational demands on companies are becoming intense, and they are facing an unprecedented rapid change where digitalisation strategies need to be embraced profoundly and quickly. Organisations should continually innovate and adapt their processes and business models to emerging trends. To keep pace with these changes, cloud technology has become pivotal.

SAP S/4HANA, to be released in the coming year, represents a go-to release for next-generation technology and compatibility with legacy software. Followed by this launch, SAP S/4HANA will transform into a two-year release cycle, a long seven years of mainstream maintenance per release, and more effortlessly adaptable feature packs. In addition to this significant milestone, SAP provides customers on releases 1709, 1809, and 1909 of SAP/4HANA an extended maintenance option, enabling them to upgrade directly to the 2023 version.

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SAP announced that until 2040 there would be at least one SAP S/4HANA release in maintenance that remains unaltered. The SAP S/4HANA 2023 version represents an evolution in product maturity and enhances the ability to offer a growing range of services, business process optimisation, and optimal practices to help existing and new customers leverage their full potential.

It is necessary for users to have the flexibility to drive innovation at their own pace. Based on this idea, SAP responds to customers’ needs by rendering the extended maintenance option, paving the way to the cloud from wherever they are in their cloud ERP journey or discovering their path. SAP S/4HANA plays a central role in this transformation.

Over the past few years, SAP S/4HANA has delivered innovative solutions to customers and encouraged them to upgrade their installations frequently, including the new SAP S/4HANA releases. The impending launches will mark a new chapter for customers, with next-generation technology and various alternative SAP S/4HANA capabilities for legacy compatibility aspects of SAP’s software.

Embracing the 2023 SAP 4/HANA version will help customers find it easier to bring their SAP environment up to date and keep it current. This advanced environment offers a wider opportunity for continuous innovation without intervention and enables organisations to become cloud-ready if and when they ought to be. To ensure customers stay up to date easily, SAP is initiating steps to reduce consumer upgrade numbers and deliver greater value.

These methods include: shifting the product to a two-year release cycle beginning with SAP S/4HANA 2023; providing early SAP new release adopters with a longer productive use time frame of the product; increasing their ROI, and SAP S/4HANA 2023 retaining the predecessors' zero-downtime capabilities. In addition, SAP will bring more application innovation to meet customer needs through fewer disruptions.

Easy-to-adopt features will be distributed every six months in the first two years. The two-year release cycles’ combination and additional feature packs should offer more opportunities for co-innovation with customers without upgrading the product, streamlining adoption and alleviating total implementation costs. Starting with SAP S/4HANA 2023, every release will be in mainstream maintenance for seven years, up from five years in previous releases.

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