When SAP first introduced C/4 HANA there was a great confusion among my customers. Could it be a new product nobody had heard about? After all, the similarity in name to S/4 HANA (which is the next evolution of SAP ERP) was striking.
However, at least for the time being, C/4 HANA was "just" a marketing term used by SAP when speaking about their various "customer clouds" (Sales Cloud, Service Cloud, Marketing Cloud, Customer Cloud etc.) and not a new product.
Now, however, C/4 HANA appears to begin taking shape as a product by the name of "C/4 HANA foundation". My excitement was a bit subdued when I realized that the features of this new product are quite limited:
- an overview of your "C/4" product subscriptions ("Entitlements")
- access to some security and audit logs ("Logs")
- basic ability to link external "clouds" (e.g. hosted on Google Cloud Platform) to your C/4 clouds ("Extensibility")
So nothing here, really, that would warrant purchasing a licence (yep, it's not for free [Update 19/11/2019: C/4 HANA foundation is actually free of charge for existing C/4 customers, though C4C help says that it's "not included in the subscription for SAP C/4HANA cloud products". So apparently that means you can subscribe for free. Thanks @VishnAndr & @vkehayov!]), rather something a basic kind of 360° Admin view we would expect in a fully fledged C/4 HANA suite.
But, as SAP say themselves, it's "just" the C/4 HANA Foundation and starting with the foundation is always a good idea in any building project, so let's see what SAP has coming while we wait for the CRM counterpart to S/4 HANA.