S/4HANA, launched in 2015, is “Business Suite 4 SAP HANA”, with the S standing for Simple — a reference to its simplified data model on the HANA database.
Wacky Facts
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The “R” in SAP R/3 stands for real-time.
SAP’s early products processed data immediately instead of in overnight batches, which was unusual at the time. R/2 ran on mainframes; R/3 (1992) brought the idea to client–server systems.
SAP’s name stands for a German phrase.
Systemanalyse Programmentwicklung — “System Analysis Program Development”.
Tally started as a financial tool for a textile business.
Shyam Sunder Goenka and his son Bharat Goenka began building the software in the 1980s for his businesses.
Oracle was named after a CIA project.
The company grew from a CIA database project code-named Oracle in the late 1970s.
1972SAP started with five ex-IBM employees.
SAP was founded in 1972 in Germany; its first product was a real-time financial accounting system.
1992Essbase stands for “Extended Spreadsheet Database”.
Developed by Arbor Software in 1992, it is now part of Oracle’s EPM products.
SAP is a German acronym.
The company’s name originally stood for “Systemanalyse Programmentwicklung” and later “Systeme, Anwendungen und Produkte in der Datenverarbeitung” — Systems, Applications and Products in Data Processing.
SAP HANA keeps whole databases in memory.
Introduced around 2010, SAP HANA stores data primarily in RAM and in columns rather than rows, which makes large analytical queries far faster than traditional disk-based databases. It is the foundation of SAP S/4HANA.
SAP was founded in 1972 by five former IBM employees.
Dietmar Hopp, Hasso Plattner, Claus Wellenreuther, Klaus Tschira and Hans-Werner Hector left IBM to build standard software for real-time business processing. Their first customer site was a chemical company, and they worked on its computers at night.
2017GST in India launched at midnight.
The Goods and Services Tax came into force at midnight on 1 July 2017 at a special session of Parliament.
Smart View is the successor to the Essbase Excel Add-in.
For years finance teams pulled Essbase data into Excel with the classic Excel Add-in. Oracle Smart View replaced it and now connects Excel to Essbase, Planning and other EPM cloud services.