What’s new in SAP C/4HANA suite – trends and highlights in 2019
Kinga Tarczyńska, SAP Marketing Consultant
- 23th August 2019
- Knowledge base
- 4 min
Since SAP announced the SAP C/4HANA suite, the product has been improved several times to offer tools that meet the current needs of customers. In this article, I’d like to introduce you to the innovations and trends that will be on the agenda in the coming months. Here’s all you need to know about news in SAP C/4HANA suite.
SAP C/4HANA Foundation: SAP C/4HANA Cockpit
One year after the launch of SAP C/4HANA, SAP released a new product: SAP C/4HANA Foundation. This solution is an answer to the most common issues faced by software developers during the implementation of new business models. SAP C/4HANA Foundation is an innovative technology layer that complements SAP C/4HANA with agility, openness, and extensibility and also reduces operational costs. This powerful software solution delivers an excellent customer experience with no extra charge for customers entitled to use SAP C/4HANA.
Source: Blogs.sap.com
Currently, C/4HANA Foundation contains two products: SAP C/4HANA Cockpit and SAP C/4HANA Cloud Platform Extension Factory. Below I’ll describe the key features of the first product. For information about the second project, please refer to the next paragraph.
SAP C/4HANA Cockpit is a place where customers can track all their entitlements, the list of subscribed cloud solutions and its’ statuses. It’s a unique place with a central administration point. With Cockpit, C/4HANA customers will have free access across the entire C/4HANA suite. All you need to start using the cockpit is a valid S-user ID with an active account, which includes at least one of the SAP C/4HANA solutions products.
SAP C/4HANA Cloud Platform Extension Factory
It is a new, go-to-native extensibility framework project to support customers in creating cloud-native extensions:
✓ Based on open source project Kyma (you’ll find out more about Kyma later in the article),
✓ Harmonizes and provides a smooth integration across SAP C/4HANA and non-SAP solutions.
Source: Blogs.sap.com
Apart from already existing possibilities to create and run extensions on the SAP Cloud Platform, the SAP CP Extension Factory offers more capabilities to improve products development:
✓ Central Management Plane – apps can be connected directly to the customer’s global account on SAP Cloud Platform. It also provides the capability to store data (like URLs, APIs, and more) of purchased solutions and application events. Customers using Cental Management Plane have an overall view of their systems and can easily share access to them with their developers. At the moment, SAP Cloud Platform Extension Factory is supporting the connection with SAP Commerce Cloud, SAP Sales & Service Cloud, and SAP Marketing Cloud. SAP is planning to extend the connectivity with SAP SuccessFactors, SAP Fieldglass, SAP Concur, SAP Ariba, and other SAP & Partner solutions.
✓ Freedom to choose the runtime – currently Central Management Plane enables the support of Kubernetes. In the future, customers will be able to choose also from various runtimes like SAP Cloud Platform ABAP environment, Cloud Foundry, and also serverless-based solution.
✓ Freedom to choose the infrastructure – as with the Runtime of Choice, it’s up to the customer to select the infrastructure on which extensions can be run: Azure or Google Cloud Platform. Soon it’ll be possible to choose also AWS or Alibaba Cloud.
✓ Kubernetes-based runtimes consist of the supplied Kubernetes cluster, using the managed offers of Kubernetes from GCP (Google Kubernetes Engine) or Azure (Azure Kubernetes Service) and the open-source project Kyma installed and configured on it.
✓ Kyma simplifies and improves the experience of developers using Kubernetes to expand corporate applications with a modern and cloud-based approach. For more information about Kubernetes and Kyma, please refer to the next paragraph.
Source: Blogs.sap.com
Kyma, Kubernetes and SAP CP Extension Factory
As I’ve already mentioned, the Kubernetes runtime in SAP C/4HANA CP Extension Factory is made in BYOL (Bring Your License) model, which means that customers need to have their license for either Google Cloud Platform Platform or Azure. On top of the Kubernetes, you should have the open-source project Kyma installed, that is free of charge. With it, you can start your remarkable journey with Extension Factory. What is the Kyma project?
Kyma project is an open-source project designed natively on Kubernetes, based on large open-source and cloud-based projects such as Istio, NATS, Kubeless and Prometheus. Its uniqueness, however, lies in the binder that holds these components together. Kyma brings together these state-of-the-art solutions in one place and combines them with internally developed features that allow easy and intuitive connection and expansion of business applications.
The project was created as an initiative in SAP to meet the software development needs that emerged as customers moved through their digital transformation journey. Kyma is designed to provide the tools developers need to be able to write a complete, end-to-end, production-grade cloud-native application. With Kyma you can also connect to any application with a Kubernetes cluster and expose its APIs and Events. Furthermore, Kyma is also serverless. This solution allows you to write shortcode fragments, known as functions or lambdas, that consume events revealed by the Application Connector and use external services provided by the Service Catalog to trigger some business logic.
To learn more about the key features of Kyma, please watch the following video based on a real scenario.
You can also find more details on the Kyma project website.
SAP for Me – personalized access point to your entire SAP product portfolio
SAP for Me was launched as a new central digital entry point for SAP customers, which is offering relevant online self-services, emphasizing important tasks, actions and events, as well as providing valuable information about SAP product portfolio. You’ll find here information about related incidents, details of your license compliance, or gain knowledge about a certain service. If you’re interested in improving your skills with a particular SAP solution, you can start with Learning Journeys related to this product. SAP for Me will let you know how many trainings you have started and completed so far.
Before SAP for Me was introduced, obtaining a comprehensive view of your business or product portfolio required logging into multiple access points. Now you can gather data from a single location and manage your time more efficiently.
All you need to start your journey with SAP for Me is an S-user!
SAP is on the way to make things easier and more accessible for the customers. Until now, many users felt that they were wasting their time searching for information on different systems or using various applications. Nowadays, they can obtain the information they need from one access point (SAP for Me, SAP C/4HANA Cockpit).
Do you want to use innovative cloud solutions?
- On 23/08/2019
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