Why Choose SAP S/4HANA Cloud Public Edition? Key Benefits and Use Cases

SAP S/4HANA Cloud Public Edition is the SaaS form of SAP’s ERP product and offers all the benefits of an SaaS offering, such as fast innovation adoption, low total cost of ownership (TCO), easy scalability, no-hassle upgrades, and limited liability.

SAP S/4HANA Cloud Public Edition Is Rapidly Evolving

SAP’s official roadmap for SAP S/4HANA Cloud is aggressive, and it adds huge amounts of functionality (including AI use cases) in a short period of time. This may lead to bringing large accounts with high complexity into the public cloud, and there’s also ongoing innovation in terms of supporting additional country versions and languages.

The release cycles are biannual for the public cloud for major releases, while smaller, nondisruptive feature additions happen every month.

Who Should Consider SAP S/4HANA Cloud Public Edition?

Currently, the following type of companies are good candidates for SAP S/4HANA Cloud:

• Firms that have a user base of 500+ employees, want to adopt fairly standard processes, are growing, and want to implement an ERP solution.
• Small (but growing), medium, and large firms that specifically intend to adopt the cloud, take a fit-to-standard approach to their business processes, and rapidly leverage innovation.
• Existing SAP customers that want to streamline their processes, reduce technical debt, and innovate on top of core standard processes on cloud platforms like SAP BTP. SAP S/4HANA Cloud Public Edition may be a good fit for their core business as well.
• Large, complex firms, that want to adopt a two-tier model. Those with complex or highly customized systems at the corporate level can adopt SAP S/4HANA Cloud Private Edition, while subsidiaries can adopt SAP S/4HANA Cloud Public Edition. The subsidiaries in this case are at liberty to be more innovative and flexible, which can be particularly useful when subsidiaries are in a different country from their parent company.

SAP S/4HANA Cloud Private Edition and GROW with SAP

SAP S/4HANA Cloud Private Edition provides flexibility similar to an on-premise option, and users have access to IMG activities. This version also supports many industry solutions and has more country and language support options than SAP S/4HANA Cloud Public Edition, as of Q2 2024.

GROW with SAP is an offering from SAP that has the SAP S/4HANA Cloud Public Edition at its core, combined with other offerings like automation, procurement, financial management, and human resources (HR).

Choosing the Right Deployment Option

The figures below depict the decision process for choosing a solution in the public cloud, in the private cloud, or on-premise. This figure shows the process for new customers.

This figure shows the process for existing SAP customers.

New customers can choose between the on-premise SAP S/4HANA product version or the SAP S/4HANA Cloud product version.

In the SAP S/4HANA Cloud version, they can choose SAP S/4HANA Cloud Private Edition if they want to retain their investment in their existing SAP ERP system. This is because this is the only cloud version that currently allows system conversion from an existing SAP ERP system, based on the right version and support pack of the SAP ERP on-premise version.

Customers opt for SAP S/4HANA Cloud Public Edition under the situations explained at the beginning of this post. Also, customers can opt for the on-premise SAP S/4HANA product with public cloud hosting options (infrastructure as a service [IaaS]) on any of the SAP certified hyperscalers).

However, any adoption of on-premise SAP S/4HANA, whether new or as a conversion from an existing SAP ERP system, is more of an exception now in 2024 because many of the specialized innovations for AI require the cloud versions and SAP’s strategy to focus primarily on the cloud.

Existing SAP customers can check whether the SAP S/4HANA Cloud Public Edition version meets their requirements, and if it does, they can go for a greenfield implementation of SAP S/4HANA Cloud Public Edition and use the GROW with SAP model (as of 2024). Otherwise, they have to convert to SAP S/4HANA Cloud Private Edition, typically by using the RISE with SAP offering.

Why Choose SAP S/4HANA Cloud Public Edition

The overall value proposition for SAP S/4HANA Cloud Public Edition can be summarized as follows:

• Simple and quick implementation; go-live in weeks
• Half-yearly releases, interspersed with regular monthly nondisruptive feature updates
• A fit-to-standard implementation approach
• Machine learning and AI capabilities
• Access to the Joule AI-based digital assistant
• Integrated solutions for carbon accounting in the form of SAP Green Ledger
• Predictive analytics
• An in-memory database (SAP HANA)
• Real-time insights
• Native integration
• Availability across all devices
• Reduced complexity of the digital agenda using best practices
• Faster innovation due to new releases of machine learning, automation, and AI technologies occurring in the cloud before on-premise
• Much simpler operations
• Possible customizations, though in specific patterns

Editor’s note: This post has been adapted from a section of the book SAP S/4HANA: An Introduction by Devraj Bardhan, Axel Baumgartl, Madalina Dascalescu, Mark Dudgeon, Piotr Górecki, Asidhara Lahiri, Richard Maund, Bert Meijerink, and Andrew Worsley-Tonks. They are are a multinational author team working for IBM, SAP, and Accenture. They have
been working with SAP S/4HANA since its first release.

This post was originally published 4/2025.