SAP S/4 HANA Cloud

SAP S/4HANA Cloud is a Software as a Service (SaaS) edition of S/4HANA. It’s available to enterprises both in public and private clouds and enables users to leverage S/4HANA functionality without any need for hardware, a database, or internal IT staff.
In S/4HANA Cloud, SAP will provide and handle almost everything for the customer, including applications, data, runtime, middleware, operating system, servers, storage, and networking.

SAP S/4HANA On-Premise vs. Cloud – The Differences

Now that the definition for each system is clear, it’s time to take a look at the main differences between the two–the differences that most often become customers’ main concerns.

Licensing Model – SAP provides a different licensing model for each deployment: a traditional perpetual license or a subscription license. Most on-premise deployments are licensed on a perpetual license model, which means customers receive the right to use SAP’s software in perpetuity.

A company is charged an initial software fee, based on the software products ordered and the number of employees who will be using that software.

So, let’s say a customer would like to deploy S/4HANA on-premise, and they have 5,000 employees, but only 100 of them will have the authorization to use SAP. Then, the license fee is only based on those 100 SAP Professional Users, who only need to be licensed once. 

The subsequent annual fee, including for maintenance and support, is then based on this initial licensing fee and will not change unless a company adds/changes the software or the number of usersSAP Business One HANA/SQL