Linux Is Ever More Prevalent In Mid-Sized Businesses

If thinking about SAP, thinking about Business Suite successor S/4 Hana is inevitable. More often than not, ERP solution SAP Business One (B1) for small and mid-sized enterprises gets overlooked, although it has developed into an important asset over the last years. There are more than ten thousand installations of B1 worldwide.

Furthermore, large companies and large mid-sized businesses also use Business One for their hub-and-spoke strategies. Meaning that they use a classic SAP system or S/4 in their headquarters and B1 in their subsidiaries, and those two SAP systems are linked  with each other and integrated.

By the way, there are numerous B1 solutions for different industries with specialized application functions, for example for the process industry, the plastics industry, for engineering and so on. Currently, B1 is offered in the version 9.3 along with Business One cloud solutions.

Tangible advantages

Of course, SAP Business One is not excluded from the Hana consolidation, and with Hana also comes Linux. In fact, Hana together with Suse SLES for SAP Applications is more and more prominently deployed in companies who use B1. According to a survey by Suse, currently 6000 customers worldwide are using SAP Business One powered by SAP Hana with the OS platform SLES for SAP Applications, and therefore profit from the combination of Hana and Suse Linux.

Fun fact: B1 was the first SAP ERP solution ever to leverage the in-memory data base Hana and OS Suse Linux Enterprise Server for mission critical use – even before BWoH, SoH, S/4, BW/4 and so on!

Additionally, mid-sized companies also appreciate the numerous innovations on the base of modern technologies, which came in the form of a sophisticated and extensive range of functions. Since 1999, they have been developed for the advantageous deployment of Hana and Linux by SAP and Suse in close collaboration. For example, they can be used to make deployments easier, minimize downtimes, increase high availability, optimize performance and simplify the management of SAP Hana systems, or to simply save money.

Whether it is a small or a big company: The user group of mid-sized enterprises basically places the same demands upon a functioning, stable and expendable SAP system environment like a major company. The only difference is that in those companies, the granularity of business processes is more delicate, and big SAP system environments have to cater to different infrastructural needs regarding the processed data volume and number of users.

Increasing prevalence of Linux

SAP Business One powered by Hana in combination with Suse Linux Enterprise Server for SAP Applications also functions perfectly well with hundreds of users and can support a company’s specific demands.

By the way, there are roughly 500 SAP channel partners in the B1 market worldwide. Suse is supporting them in every way possible and works with them on customer projects. This is especially important considering that SAP in mid-sized companies often means that SAP partners are the direct customer interface.

Because of SAP, SAP channel partners and Suse, the prevalence of Linux and therefore Open Source increases in big and small mid-sized companies.