This book describes the next generation of business applications in the innovative new SAP Business Suite 4 SAP HANA (SAP S/4HANA), exploiting the revolutionary capabilities of the SAP HANA in-memory database. Numerous real-world examples are presented illustrating the disruptive potential of this technology and the quantum leap it has facilitated in terms of simplicity, flexibility, and speed for new applications. The intuitive structure of this book offers a straightforward business perspective grounded in technology in order to enable valuable business insights drawn from the wealth of real-world experience of the book’s two authors, both prominent figures in the field of business application systems: Hasso Plattner and Bernd Leukert.
Hasso Plattner is the co-founder of SAP and the founder of the Hasso Plattner Institute, affiliated with the University of Potsdam, Germany. Bernd Leukert is a member of the SAP Executive Board and the Global Managing Board of SAP.
Prof. Dr. h.c. Hasso Plattner is the chair of the Enterprise Platform and Integration Concepts research group at the HPI, which focuses mainly on in-memory data management for enterprise applications and human-centered software design and engineering. He is the author or co-author of over 100 scientific publications and has served as a keynote speaker in conferences such as ACM SIGMOD and VLDB. He currently also serves as a visiting professor at the Stanford University Institute of Design. Prof. Plattner received his diploma in communications engineering from the University of Karlsruhe. In recent years, he has been focusing on teaching and research in the field of business computing and software engineering at large. In 1998, he founded the HPI in Potsdam, Germany. At the HPI, approximately 500 students are currently pursuing their Bachelor and Master degrees in IT Systems Engineering with the help of roughly 50 professors and lecturers. The HPI currently has over 100 PhD candidates.
Bernd Leukert is a member of the Executive Board and the Global Managing Board of SAP. He is responsible for the development and delivery of all products across SAP’s portfolio, including applications, analytics, cloud, mobile, as well as database and technology. Leukert joined SAP in 1994 and has held various management positions in application development, technology development, software engineering, and process governance. Leukert’s efforts have contributed considerably to SAP’s pro
duct portfolio, including SAP R/3, Supply Chain Management (SCM), SAP Business Suite, SAP Business One, and the SAP Business Suite 4 SAP HANA (S/4HANA).
