Toward the end of last year, we attended SAP TechEd in Las Vegas to understand where SAP is taking its products from a technology standpoint and to gain insight into the company's overall vision for its customers. Based on this experience, formal announcements and SAP employee feedback over the past few months, we have put together a list of the top SAP technology trends of 2016. This analysis will be split into five short pieces that will be released over the course of several days. Together, the series will present a complete view of the SAP world for the coming year.

Core technology themes for 2016

The core themes for SAP this year are expected to be the cloud, S/4 and HANA, since SAP is positioning its offerings as the "digital core" for modern businesses. SAP technology is currently in an active delivery cycle, producing product updates and adding features. Focus on S/4HANA is expected, but the coming innovations on the core HANA platform will be interesting — HANA is truly becoming a full-fledged development and runtime environment, not just an in-memory database. It will be able to host applications using a wide range of technologies, such as TomEE and Node.js, and provide enterprise integration options, all while getting support through SAP's development tools.

This series will dig deeper into what these changes mean for SAP customers, especially developers, admins, DABs and users.

We will explore the following four topics in depth:

1. HANA and S/4: Simplifying to grow
2. ABAP, CDS and Solution Manager: Custom development
3. SAP and Cloud: Continues to fly
4. Fiori: A view into the future

This is by no means an exhaustive list of all SAP focus topics. It is just our opinion on what will stand out in the coming year, especially as it relates to the impact on development and adoption of new features in 2016. Stay tuned as we go through each topic, and feel free to voice your thoughts. We would love to hear your ideas and answer any questions in the comments section.