SAP applications are around for quite some time now and so is the option and need to extend them. SAP took care of this and offered many extension mechanisms within the underlying ABAP technology stack. In addition, the ABAP platform itself served as a strong workhorse to build custom-specific functionality and apps collocated to the SAP core system. Unfortunately, this came at a price
S/4
SAP envisions BW/4HANA as an unrestricted data warehouse solution for the modern enterprise-level organization. Data warehousing is a consolidation of corporate and extra-corporate data than can be analyzed for decision-making and innovative new products. Look for future releases to integrate more tightly with Hadoop and provide big data lakes, machine learning, and intelligent data analysis.
SAP S/4 Hana Past upgrades include the 1511, 1610, 1709, 1809 and recently the 1909 releases. These upgrades are centered on machine learning and automation. In the SAP S/4HANA 1909 release, SAP went a step further and embedded these capabilities into the platform’s core. SAP calls this the digital core.
SAP plans to transform S/4HANA Finance into an intelligent ERP that can leverage machine learning and apply predictive analytics to the data explosion expected from the Internet of Things (IoT). Future releases include a personalized digital assistant driven by natural language processing (NLP) and artificial intelligence.