SAP S4HANA on AWS Reviews

The cost is a factor for our customers, so that is an area for improvement. That is, compared to its competitors, SAP S4HANA on AWS is a costly solution. 

More availability zones will help customers choose AWS.

I would like to see features that provide easier onboarding for ERP solutions like SAP. SAP has already partnered with S/4HANA on AWS for hosting its public cloud as well. More educational videos for customers to choose this cloud path would be great to have. That is, providing more documentation and marketing material would be better.

I've worked with SAP S/4HANA for four years and on AWS for about four years.

It is indeed a stable solution, but it depends on how you architecture the component in AWS. If the component has the right architecture and is properly provisioned and placed, then it will be a stable platform.

It is scalable.

Compared to its competitors, SAP S4HANA on AWS is a costly solution.

From a business process perspective, I would recommend that customers stick with the standard, which will help them to easily adopt the solution.

AWS is a market leader and pioneer in realizing cloud concepts and is once step ahead of its peers.

On a scale from one to ten, I would give SAP S4HANA on AWS an eight.

Infrastructure-wise, if you have your own data center and you're running SAP ECC, a very initial or the older version of SAP ERP - if that's the case, you need to maintain your own data center. You need to maintain your own infrastructure away from the server or network. SAP offers cloud hosting to help with that.

You can directly host your SAP system on AWS, Azure, or other cloud hosting services. SAP also provides its own cloud hosting part. That way, infrastructure activities are smaller. You don't have to have your own team of infrastructure guys to maintain each and every thing. Your infrastructure services get minimized a lot. You can save costs.

Issues related to the infrastructure also get reduced. Servers, et cetera, get reduced. Everything is stable and can be contained in dedicated AWS services.

They have their own instances where you can host your database. You can host your system, wherein AWS completely takes care of that hosting part. You just need to maintain and run the system and you have and just pay for the services you want to, which you have acquired, or which you are utilizing. It's pay as you need. The cost gets minimized a lot for a bigger ERP like SAP and you need to have any minimum resources from infrastructure which you need to take care of. It's a couple of SAP business administrators and the cloud architect. That's it.

Therefore, in terms of maintenance and cost, it is reduced by a lot and when you're hosting a SAP system on the cloud, the system is very fast. The system is secure and stable. And the accessibility of your SAP system to your business users is very properly organized so that there is no lag in terms of performance or in terms of integration is getting concerned. 

For the cloud part, it's very good. However, some customers are a bit skeptical and a bit hesitant regarding putting their data on the cloud. And, even if they want to put their data, the business transactional data, or their company data on the cloud or not, you will still have to take care of all these licenses from a security perspective. Just recently, we had a European client who wants to work with the SAP system, however, they don't want to go on the cloud. They want to go with the on-premise solution. This is possible. For this particular solution, with the AWS angle, it won't necessarily work for them. We'll have to go with the client's requirements. We'll host on-premises.

The integration part is quite secure and stable. Only the part from the customer side that's been raised is regarding their data hosting part on the cloud. Otherwise, we don't see any issue with hosting SAP on AWS. It's always good to have on there since it reduces cost. It reduces your maintenance-wise integration also. 

They are a very big company and their own data centers although you have to make all these protocols and service agreements so that the data will not get lost. You have to take proper care of the data. You have to take daily backups before any availability or any optimization. On-premise we also used to take backups, however, it was very manageable.

There are a few complexities when it comes to licensing that could be simplified. 

Regarding SAP S/4HANA services, we have been using these services for the last three to four years. Until 2017 or 2018, we were into SAP ECC. Therefore, our consultants are having major experience from various backgrounds. As a company, as a business service provider, we've used this product for the last three years.

The stability is fine. We do have a certified cloud consultant with us who is AWS-level certified and even our SAP business person is also SAP S/4HANA business certified. We do have our certified consultants who can take care of things and ensure it runs seamlessly. There are no performance issues. 

The solution can scale. We just have to identify how many users are there since we have to identify the instance of the database. That is very important. The common instance of the database needs to be created so we need to identify properly and number of CPUs, number of database instances, et cetera. All those things should be identified and once those are properly identified, then making and implementing the system and designing the system and running the system is not an issue. 

We have three clients that deal with this product.

We can always log and raise incidents. From the system side, only business and cloud architects are needed to manage any technical issues.

The initial setup was not a big task. We haven't had any kind of issues. The last time we did it within two months by completely making the setup of the SAP landscape quality. If the requirements and the services are getting properly identified, then the integrations became very easy.

For technical staff, we deploy four to five staff members from our side. We have a couple of cloud architects, one DBA wherein we have to align sometimes the SAP person to take care of the SAP node implementation, all those things, and to our SAP business side. They all ensure the implementation part is getting done. If it's a very small stack, then two to three consultants are enough. If it is a big one, then we might require four to six staff. It all depends upon the size of the landscape, how many cloud instances, and how many data instances we have to implement. 

We had a competent consultant that took care of all the requirements and made the setup simple. 

The cost is quite reasonable. It's less than if you had an on-premises setup or used different clouds. 

You do need licensing from the AWS side.

The cost may vary depending on if a company is taking a Greenfield approach or a Brownfield approach. If you're migrating your older systems to a newer system, then you have to upgrade your licenses, however, if you're starting with a completely new system, as in Greenfield, then you have to purchase a few extras, which might be a bit costly. The rate varies from SAP regarding those licensing parts. Each package depends completely upon the hosting instance, the cloud instance. It depends upon how much big infrastructure you want. 

We are an SAP partner. 

We deploy both on-cloud and on-premises versions. We have done SAP on cloud on AWS and the latest cloud solution, which is provided by SAP - Horizon ERP. SAP is increasing a lot. We have more returns from Horizon SAP compared to AWS, however, with AWS, we do have our consultants on the infrastructure side - including SAP cloud architects and SAP business consultants who are well versed regarding the requirements.

I am into the development area, but for me and my organization, I am looking after the SAP business development part for the client acquisition and sales and marketing.

Whether the solution would be a good fit for a company depends upon three scenarios. If the customer is a bit hesitant about the cloud, for example, then we go for SAP on-premise. If the customer is not hesitating about the data, then SAP and AWS are also good, however, SAP is also coming up with their own SAP online solution, which also might work for some people. Cost-wise, SAP AWS is always better.

I'd rate the solution seven out of ten.

We've used the solution for HR and their salary processes, including the salary payments. That is still on the SAP, however, the database they have changed to a HANA database.

The solution is quite stable. 

The solution is scalable. 

The initial setup could be easier. It's complex. 

The solution is very stable. It's reliable. There aren't bugs or glitches. It doesn't crash or freeze. Previously, there was an Oracle database, and, with HANA, they had much fewer problems with the database.

It's more of a stable landscape and the organization has to make a decision for the next generation.

The product is scalable. It works well with large organizations. It was a very big implementation. In the Netherlands, we had around 160,000 workers for the central government, and all the HR processes and the salary payments were performed with SAP. 

We do not have plans to increase this number of users, as the Dutch government is growing, however, not that much.

Technical support is fine, however, the organization I'm with isn't going very fast. Yeah. They need help and I'm an IT consultant and I've helped them for more than a year.

The company still has SAP on-premises, however, they are considering moving to the cloud. They want to change the whole landscape and move to the next step with their SAP implementation within the Dutch government.

The initial setup was a complex landscape with many problems which have to be solved initially.

The company had a much older implementation. It's not a full SAP and that makes the whole landscape very complex.

With the HANA database, the company has been busy with it for two or three years, as it's taken much time. Last year, things went better and they migrated to HANA.

As is usual for SAP, license management was in order.

I'm not sure which version of the solution we're using.

I'd recommend the solution to other users and organizations. 

I would rate the product eight out of ten.

We only provide the infrastructure, not the solution. We use just the infrastructure that we provide to our customers and customers include the system integrated to deploy the SAP S/4HANA inside the AWS infrastructure. The customer likes it that way.

In every organization, there are several systems including project management and production planning. They can get integrated in a way that they can actually link up with all these departments and get common visibility. Clients use SAP for that.

SAP is number one in the world in all the years I've used this solution. There are other ERP solutions such as Oracle (EBS). There are other ERPs and different ERPs, however, SAP is number one in terms of providing the complex modules so that the customer can have complete automation and complete visibility.

The solution adds great value to any organization.

The solution is very stable.

The scalability is good.

The product can be very complex.

It is not extremely user-friendly.

If you want to learn SAP S/4HANA the resources are not available and it's very difficult to learn. We found that aspect very difficult. 

I've used this particular solution for over three years, however, my total experience on SAP S4HANA, and in terms of providing infrastructure for SAP solutions, I have more than 13 years of experience now.

The stability is very good. There are no bugs or glitches. It doesn't crash or freeze. The solution is very reliable. 

The solution scales well. You can integrate almost any application with SAP and you can pull data from SAP or input data in SAP.

We have more than 20 SAP clients, however, only five are on the cloud.

AWS support is very good, although it is expensive.

The solution is rather difficult to set up. It's not simple or straightforward. Only a few people know how to install SAP in our country. 

That said, I do not install the solution myself. We only sell the license. Our customers have someone else handle the implementation, which may take about 20 hours or so to deploy.

We are not a service provider or deployment provider for SAP and therefore, we do not handle maintenance. We do resale only. For that, we have a pre-sales team of two members and we have a sales team. We sell licenses only.

If clients are setting up the solution as an infrastructure as a service, they have to bring on their own license. 

We are authorized to sell SAP. We only provide infrastructure licensing. 

If our client's company would like to deploy SAP S/4HANA on the cloud, then we provide the AWS infrastructure or Huawei infrastructure to clients to deploy.

SAP B1 customers are not taking infrastructure from the cloud. They are directly taking the SAP B1 as a service on-premises. S/4HANA has separate modules that you can have on cloud models, and we do provide the cloud infrastructure to deploy S/4HANA.

We use infrastructure as a service for SAP S/4HANA deployment, though AWS has a separate offering where you can have a platform as a service offering, meaning that they will provide the infrastructure and provide SAP.

We highly recommend the solution to others and find that every year we have more and more clients implementing it.

I'd rate the solution at a nine out of ten.

Our customers use the solution to deploy S/4HANA.

The product’s high availability is its best feature.

The solution is costlier than other products.

I have been using the solution for six to seven years.

The solution is very stable. I rate the stability a ten out of ten.

I rate the product’s scalability a nine or ten out of ten. Our customers are medium and large enterprises.

I rate the ease of setup a nine out of ten.

One person can deploy the solution in a few weeks.

I rate the pricing an eight out of ten.

An enterprise customer should do a proof of concept before purchasing the solution. Overall, I rate the solution a nine out of ten.

I have found a lot of the features that SAP S4HANA provides are very good.

SAP S4HANA on AWS could improve by having the entire solution available as a web solution. They only have Fiori right now, and it's a solution for certain modules, but not for all the modules that SAP currently has. We would like to see the GUI removed, it is not very good. We want it to be web-based.

I have used SAP S4HANA on AWS within the past 12 months.

We have approximately 1,000 people using the solution in my organization. The solution is scalable.

The technical support we have received has been okay. We need to get used to using the cloud solution coming from the on-premise version. The cloud service has lead time requirements, the time before they take your case or an incident, depending on the incident, whether it is a high-priority, medium, or low. All of the lead times or waiting times for the requirement have to be taken into account. This is something that people must be willing to accept when going to this type of service because when you have on-premise, usually, you have people dedicated to it. The times are a lot shorter.

The initial setup of SAP S4HANA on AWS is complex. The deployment took approximately one year. We had approximately 80 working on the functionality of the solution and 40 people from the IT department assisting with the deployment.

We used a reseller from Central America for the deployment. 

We pay a monthly fee for the use of SAP S4HANA on AWS for approximately five years. That's the time of the contract.

There are no additional costs other than the license. However, there are other costs that come from the partners or reseller who is doing the implementation. If you want any changes or anything that wasn't taken into account at the moment you were implementing it or you need support, the cost might be very high. This is something that needs to be taken into account.

I rate SAP S4HANA on AWS an eight out of ten.

There could be many use cases for this product. The use cases will be different depending on the industry where it is employed. It could range from the manufacturing industry to the retail industry. The actual use case could be anything.  

The solution is deployed with two possible methods. One is the on-premises deployment (with AWS) and the second one is the cloud deployment. You follow the software development life cycle for deploying the solution. First, you do the project preparation followed by the solution design. This is followed by the actual realization of the design plan. In the final testing, you engage in three go-live activities. When this is successful, you follow it with an actual live deployment. With the go-live successful, there would be PGLS (Post Go-Live Support), which is nothing but the support aspect. So implementation typically follows the normal software deployment life cycle. The approach could be anything, like support could be a waterfall approach (project activities into linear sequential phases) or it could be a more aggressive approach.  

Because SAP is a part of ERP the features range from finance functions to manufacturing functions to quality control functions to procurement functions — anything you might need in development planning. So you can have tight integration between all the functions in which a manufacturing industry operates to develop market and distribute its products. The S/4HAHA platform provides insight into the processes which can become part of robotic process automation. S/4HANA as a platform is enabled for artificial intelligence and machine learning. So you can use it to help simplify your workload with automation.  

This is the latest offering by the SAP company. Of course, there are the pros and cons to on-premises deployment versus cloud deployment — especially as far as the infrastructure maintenance is concerned. There is not so much difference as far as activities are concerned. But having said that the cloud deployment is on AWS (Amazon Web Service). It is always the latest offering and the cloud is indeed today's emerging market.  

From what I understand, SAP is already at work focusing on improving the CE (Customer Experience) and the CRM (Customer Relationship Management) as far as S/4HANA is concerned. They are working with having better robotics, machine learning and artificial intelligence capabilities, which can work with this ERP. So there are already new concepts on the way. They are making a lot of use of Python technology, and they are making heavy investments to make it much more user-friendly and customer-friendly. Automation is at the center of their development focus.  

We have had an S/4HANA implementation for some time.  

The stability of the solution is fine. We have no issues with that.  

For scalability, the skill set required is very specific. You need someone who has a functional and business knowledge along with technical knowledge. A candidate or the consultant who has experience in the difference between the data technological concerns and the business trends can easily go through the entire deployment very easily. Having industry experience is very much required for deployment and scaling.  

As a consultancy, we provide some of the technical support for SAP. The support we provide is very much function specific. I am from a finance background. For finance-related support, I could be the key person in our company. For materials management, it would be someone else. Materials and quality management can be handled by a production management expert. One team member may be the marketing, distribution and logistics expert. Each subject matter expert will be deployed on the support of a particular ERP based on their areas of expertise. It is not a one-man show. One person can not run the entire support services as an expert in every area. It is very much specific to the role the candidate needs to play in addressing the subject matter as an expert in that particular function.  

As far as the deployment on AWS is concerned, it is the cloud deployment. It is a little complex. But once it is deployed, the post maintenance and the support services are very easy because the upgrades and maintenance are not handled manually. It is just like on smartphones where the patches get auto-upgraded. In the same way, the patches or the upgrades are automatically pushed to the ERP on cloud. So there is no manual maintenance required going forward. There is no downtime required. For these reasons, clients are attracted to going with cloud deployments. But others are still going with on-premises deployments for various reasons.  

There are a lot of competitors coming into the market. The main organizations as far as IT or information technology companies are involved already. We have Infosys, there is Oracle, there is Siemens, there is Accenture, there is Cognizant — all of these are from the IT organizations' perspective. From consulting companies, we have got the Lloyd Group, KPMG International (Klynveld Peat Marwick Goerdeler), PricewaterhouseCoopers, and others who are all into this. There are other up and coming competitors and consultants like BDO Mauritius (Binder Dijker Otte). All these various kinds of organizations are good at deployment and the support of SAP solutions. The main difference is in their approaches to providing solutions that are on-premises or on the cloud.  

The advice that I would give to people who want to use S/4HANA on AWS is that a specific study needs to be involved in the implementation process. It is what we call a discovery session. The idea is to discover all the independent needs for the use of the product. This includes things like the size of the organization, the size of the industry, the number of users expected, the revenue, et cetera. It should also include projections into the future aspects of organic and inorganic growth. The budget may be the main issue for many organizations. The deployment plan should be created based on keeping all these discovered factors in mind. This can affect the deployment model or choices as to whether to go for SAP S/4HANA on the cloud, on-premises or if another ERP may be a better choice. But in any case, all the factors need to be taken into consideration. It is not a black and white decision.  

On a scale from one to ten where one is the worst and ten is the best, I would rate SAP S/4HANA as very near to a ten. Maybe nine because there is no competitor like SAP in the market right now to compare the product to and maybe there is room for improvement. I think that Oracle and Microsoft are looking to close the gap. But, looking at the current market share of SAP, it is at the top so it is near to a ten.  

I'm an SAP software developer. We use the product for many different functions; financial production, material management, distribution functions. Everything. 

CDS use would be the most valuable feature. The HANA database is also valuable. 

I'm on the developer side of the product and my view, for now, is that the product is fine. I'm comfortable with it. Based on my product experience, I don't have any problems with it. If I would suggest something it would be that they unify the developer tools. 
For the next release, it would be helpful if they would include a common development environment. 

I've been using the product for three years. 

The product has good stability

The scalability is fine. 

The technical support is very good. 

The initial setup is quite straightforward. 

I think there are some processes that could be improved but it's a great solution. 

I would rate this product an eight out of 10. 

We implement it for our clients. Our primary use case is to virtualize our AX environment.

I like that they are very familiar with our VM which makes it easy to use.

Its best features are its interface. It has a user-friendly interface.

I would like for them to have more integration with virtualization platforms.

I have been using SAP S/4HANA for the last ten years. 

It's one of the most stable virtualization softwares I have used.

Scalability lacks on clustering capabilities. 

Our clients are mostly enterprise size. 

We contact technical support if we have issues but most of the time we can resolve an issue by ourselves. They're good but there's always room for improvement. 

The initial setup is straightforward. It can take one or two days depending on the setup. 

It usually only requires one person for the setup but on occasion, it can require two.

There should be the ability to deploy with clustering of different servers. They should add different types of advisory management.

I would rate it an eight out of ten. 

The use cases for this solution will depend on our customer's industry. It can be manufacturing, retail, HR, etc..

The Fiori interface is the most valuable feature. It's one of the highlights that they offer. The in-memory of S4 is very fast. 

Not just S4 but for SAP in general, the price is a little high because they have implemented a new licensing scheme on a number of connections. The price being too expensive is some of the feedback we get from our customers. 

In the next release, I would like to see more support for more cloud providers. Because right now it's only AWS and Azure that it certifies. 

I have been using it for the last four years. 

We have five to fifteen users consisting of our application team, infrastructure team, and some of our clients. 

For the maintenance of this solution you would need first, second, and third-level, so around five people in total. 

Their support is very good. They respond quickly. 

The initial setup is straightforward because they have templates that you can use to build on it. In terms of how long it takes to deploy, if it's basic it can be done within a day. 

There are a lot of factors, if there are migrations it usually takes around three months plus.

Planning is very important before undergoing an S4 implementation and upgrade. The functional components need to be planned and tested thoroughly. Otherwise, the lines will not be met. Try to do a Greenfield implementation because it will be much simpler.

I would rate it an eight out of ten.