SAP Business Suite

What is SAP Business Suite?

SAP Business Suite is a collection of integrated applications based on the SAP NetWeaver platform. The suite brings together key solutions such as SAP ERP Central Component (ECC), customer relationship management (CRM), product lifecycle management (PLM), supplier relationship management (SRM), and supply chain management (SCM). While most people think of SAP as an ERP company, SAP ECC is one of the pieces of the integrated business suite of applications.

What is SAP Business Suite?

When initially released SAP Business Suite 7 included five solutions:

SAP ECC 6.0
SAP CRM 7.0
SAP SRM 7.0
SAP SCM 7.0
SAP PLM 7.0

While the initial release utilized the SAP NetWeaver platform and the multiple underlying databases that it supported, following the 2010 release of SAP HANA, an enhanced version of the suite was released called SAP Business Suite on HANA. The only difference is that the updated version ran on SAP’s own HANA database.

Key Considerations for SAPinsiders:

Running SAP Business Suite on HANA can not only improve performance, but also provide advantages for ABAP developers. James Wood of Bowdark Consulting explains the basic concepts of leveraging the SAP HANA database using ABAP, and what developers need to change in their approach to benefit from the in-memory technology and the columnar approach to data storage. He walks through basic concepts, how to access SAP HANA using ABAP, whether new programming skills are required, and what the future holds for developing ABAP code for SAP Business Suite.
Running SAP Business Suite on the SAP HANA database offers many performance benefits as well as additional capabilities. While traditional instances of SAP NetWeaver and SAP NetWeaver Business Warehouse (BW) ran on relational databases like Oracle, Microsoft SQL, and IBM DB2, the release of SAP NetWeaver on HANA offered the in-memory capabilities of the SAP HANA platform. In this article Prakash Darji outlines the benefits that the in-memory database offers over traditional relational database management systems to allow you to benefit from the features of the new system.

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