SAP S4HANA on AWS Reviews

We primarily use the solution as an end-to-end integration. Most companies are already using financial software, but they want to have software which can offer complete integration. In our case, it's finance, material management, sales distribution, and HR.

There are two main features that we find very valuable. One is the interface and the new user experience. That's really, really helpful for the end-user. The second is the HANA database itself because it speeds up the process. In other solutions, like Oracle, there is a lot of redundancy that slows things down.

The new product has SuccessFactors. If they can bring it in on-premise as well, and basically replace SCM with SuccessFactors on-premises, that would be great. It will allow for more revenue.

The solution's weakest area is technical support, which needs to be improved quite a bit.

The solution needs a warehouse management feature. Right now, there's a built-in WM, but they don't have an EWM extended warehouse management built-in, in S/4HANA. It's a separate product. So if they can add that, that would be great.

I've been using the solution for three years.

The solution is very stable. We've had no issues at all.

The solution is scalable. With the new data connectors that they have and the new FCI NCPI integration facilities, it can be scaled up with any other third party component or even Zippy products.

Technical support is one area that they really need to improve. When you get a ticket, the response you get is "We are working on it." Yet it will take five to 15 days or sometimes even more than that to get a solution.

With the S/4HANA, it's very simple. But prior to that in ECC it used to take a lot of time, whereas, in S/4HANA, you can easily deploy, and have an implementation in three months.

Pricing depends on a lot of factors. For example, which month of the year it is. Is it close to the end of a quarter year's end? Usually, we get the best benefit out of it if we know the exact ICP events. Otherwise, price-wise, they're expensive. If you know when their quarter closing or annual closing are, you can get pricing similar to Oracle, and in some cases, even IFS.

We use both the on-premises and private cloud deployment models.

I'd rate the solution 7.5 out of ten.

We use SAP S/4HANA on AWS for an enterprise environment encompassing multiple departments and functions like JBA, operations, finance, HR, and EIBM.

The product efficiently manages the data center without manual intervention.

The platform's front-end user interface needs improvement compared to other applications.

We have been using SAP S4HANA on AWS for more than ten years.

I rate the product's stability a ten out of ten.

I rate the product's scalability a ten out of ten.

I have been using SAP for 20 years. The initial setup process for deploying it on AWS is similar to the on-premise infrastructure.

SAP S4HANA on AWS has reasonable pricing.

It is a complete enterprise application. I recommend it to those looking for an ERP product to deploy on AWS. I rate it a ten out of ten.

The documentation isn't clear enough. There are a few native services that are available for increasing the IOPS. We can either go for the database storage striping to improve the IOPS for the HWCCT requirement, or we can go for the data volume partitioning, which is available with HANA for increasing the IOPS. 

It would help during maintenance to add new storage due to the data growth. It would be easy to go for the data volume partitioning feature with HANA. It's available even with other databases, but there's no comparison with the different features.

There are a few features that are in-built and available with SAP. When it comes to the on-premises solution, we used to go with those options. When it comes to the cloud, most people compare it to their past experience with the on-premises environment rather than the new cloud solutions. They might have an in-house benchmarking comparison or test results for those things, but it would be good if they published that. It would be very helpful for us when we need to take a particular call, or when we need to go for data volume partitioning or data striping.

In Azure, files can be downloaded and easily repurposed based on our solutions, which is lacking in AWS and in GCP.

I have used this solution for the past seven years.

With Azure, there are a lot of tools available for monitoring SAP-related information. When it comes to AWS, the infrastructure isn't specific to SAP. The monitoring and backup solutions that are available with Azure are missing with AWS.

For example, take a case for HCM enrollment. For Sonic, you need to go with the SBD devices. It should be separate. The SBD devices need to be provisioned with the three nodes with AWS. We have a fencing agent in Azure, which would be cost effective, rather than provisioning three additional VMs. It's a minimal cost, but there are additional loads which need to be done on top of it.

I would rate the stability as nine out of ten. Almost all of the public cloud providers provide the same kind of stability.

The scalability is good. 

SAP has an auto-scaling feature, but Azure doesn't.

There weren't a lot of challenges with the setup.

I would rate the setup as five out of five.

It's expensive. It would be good if AWS and Azure could reduce the computing cost for people who move to the public cloud.

I would rate the pricing as four out of five.

There's not a lot of difference in the pricing of AWS and Azure. AWS is about $1 or $2 higher than Azure. Azure is cheaper when it comes to the computing part. From the partner side, I feel we are getting more benefit when it comes to Azure Cloud.

I would rate this solution as nine out of ten. 

When it comes to Azure, if you're already using existing solutions, it's easy to leverage that into a public cloud.

There are challenges with implementing AWS in India, but not Azure.

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.

I would like to see a lower price for the solution.

In order for us to use it so much, the solution has to be stable. 

The solution is scalable. 

The technical support is very good. I would rate it as a four and a half out of five. 

Positive

The initial setup was not an easy installation. It was very complex. 

I would rate the pricing as a two and a half out of five. 

My advice to someone looking to implement this solution would be to just do it. 

I would rate this solution as a nine out of ten because it covers all the fields, has a big maturity, and has something other solutions are missing, which is speed.

We have clients who use SAP S4HANA on AWS.

The solution is deployed on the cloud.

The operation of the solution is good. It's easy to use and user-friendly.

The pricing is a little bit high.

I have used this solution for about seven years.

It's stable.

It's scalable. It's about 70% scalable.

I would rate this solution as seven out of ten.

I would recommend it to those who want to use it.

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 are using SAP S4HANA on AWS for test cases.

The most valuable feature of SAP S4HANA on AWS is the latency and speed. When we use the various typical relation database, the performance was visible.

We had some storage and legacy migrations problems with SAP S4HANA on AWS.

I have been using SAP S4HANA on AWS for approximately nine months.

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