SAP today introduced the latest advances to SAP S/4HANA Cloud and shared its road map for the industry's next-generation, leading-edge cloud ERP suite. With a new architecture of in-memory technology in combination with contextual analytics, digital assistant capabilities, machine learning and the award-winning SAP Fiori user experience, SAP S/4HANA Cloud enables customers to instantly adjust and adopt business processes and models and act on real-time insight and advice. The announcement was made at SAP Capital Markets Day at the New York Stock Exchange, where SAP executives showcased a combination of strategy and innovation. The ERP offering from SAP provides enterprise-ready functionality for digital business in industry and line-of-business functions, with faster deployment, time to value and lower entry costs of cloud delivery. Industry research firm IDC predicts that the software-as-a-service (SaaS) business applications market will grow 17 percent annually to $103.9B in 2020 from $47.4B in 2015.*

Thew new world of'intelligent ERP' brings contextual analytics, machine learning and digital assistants... it's enough to make your accountancy personnel smile, probably. As we keep saying, data is no longer just a string of binary 1s and 0s. In doing so, we can then act on different chunks of data in different ways. In the heavy-lifting world of Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP), the idea that we can work on some elements of a firm's data workload in one area… but then sprinkle on some special functions (as and when needed) very much reflects what cloud computing is supposed to be all about. In a word, this is all about flexibility, based on as-a-Service-centric computing.