How Accurate Was SAP in Keeping S/4HANA Exclusive to HANA?

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Executive Summary

What SAP said about keeping S/4HANA exclusive to HANA.
How our prediction stacked up against SAP.

What SAP Said About Keeping S/4HANA Exclusive to HANA

When SAP introduced S/4HANA, they made the very unusual policy of making S/4HANA and HANA a packaged deal. This meant that S/4HANA could only work on HANA, which pushed out the traditional database vendors like Oracle, IBM, and Microsoft from the S/4HANA database market.

Our References for This Article

If you want to see our references for this article and other related Brightwork articles, see this link.

Notice of Lack of Financial Bias: We have no financial ties to SAP or any other entity mentioned in this article.

This is published by a research entity, not some lowbrow entity that is part of the SAP ecosystem.
Second, no one paid for this article to be written, and it is not pretending to inform you while being rigged to sell you software or consulting services. Unlike nearly every other article you will find from Google on this topic, it has had no input from any company's marketing or sales department. As you are reading this article, consider how rare this is. The vast majority of information on the Internet on SAP is provided by SAP, which is filled with false claims and sleazy consulting companies and SAP consultants who will tell any lie for personal benefit. Furthermore, SAP pays off all IT analysts -- who have the same concern for accuracy as SAP. Not one of these entities will disclose their pro-SAP financial bias to their readers.

What We Said About S/4HANA’s Exclusivity to HANA

In 2016 we predicted that SAP Will Have to Backtrack on S/4 on HANA Database that SAP would change this policy.

This prediction’s logic was that it would be too costly in terms of lost S/4HANA revenues to continue to hold to the exclusive relationship between S/4HANA and HANA.

In the intervening years, and in response to SAP’s aggressive marketing around column-oriented and “in memory” database benefits (which we covered in the article How Accurate Was SAP on In Memory Computing?) Oracle, IBM, and Microsoft all swiftly added column-orientated capabilities to their databases. In the article How Accurate with Bloor Research on Oracle In Memory?, we agreed with Bloor Research that columnar data stores for databases that supported ERP systems were more of a marketing gimmick. Bringing extra complexity into the environment that the ERP system would not leverage, then actual need. But as Oracle, IBM, and Microsoft followed suit, there was never any reason, outside of the monopolistic lock-in restriction, for SAP to be excluded from supporting S/4HANA. However, as an important side note, it should be observed that both Oracle and Microsoft play the same corrupt game of restricting their applications to their databases.

When Underhanded Monopolistic Vendors Complain About About Other Underhanded Monopolistic Vendors — Without Blushing

While Oracle, IBM, and Microsoft resources screamed like banshees about how SAP had locked them out of supporting S/4HANA, they tended to become very quiet or change the subject when I pointed out that their employers did the same thing. This led me to create a hypocrisy article specifically for Oracle employees with Teaching Oracle About Hypocrisy with Lock-In.

What Happened with SAP’s Policy?

SAP could change its policy with HANA and S/4HANA tomorrow. However, after close to four years since our prediction, and over five years after SAP announced its policy, it seems likely that SAP will not change the policy. Not only did SAP not break the exclusive arrangement between HANA and S/4HANA, but they have also introduced other HANA locked applications such as C4HANA.

Therefore it is time to debit our long-running accuracy measurement on SAP for our miss on this topic.

Conclusion and Calculation

SAP and the IT Analyst and IT Media Scores

SAP receives a 100% accuracy for its projection that it would keep S/4HANA exclusive to HANA.

Brightwork Research & Analysis Score

Our forecast for S/4HANA turned out to be incorrect. Therefore we have allocated a 0% accuracy for this prediction to our long term Study into SAP’s Accuracy.

Ignoring Our Accuracy

However, even with this miss, our combined predictive accuracy on SAP extremely high. SAP resources that have a problem with our research have refused to address this accuracy list, all supported by dated articles.

Link to the Parent Research Article

This is one of many research articles on a specific topic that supports a larger research calculation. For the overview of the research calculation for all of the SAP topics that were part of the study, see the following primary research A Study into SAP’s Accuracy.