Last week, SAP and ASUG member experts delved deep and wide into the current Application Lifecycle Management (ALM) portfolio and planned enhancements over days of discussion.
ASUG Senior VP David Wascom opened the ALM Virtual Summit, encouraging attendees to be active participants. SAP SVP of ALM Marc Thier then took to the virtual “stage.” He briefly walked attendees through the three SAP ALM offerings, deftly positioning the tools, noting that for organizations ignoring SAP ALM, “you are losing out” on accelerated time to value, improving competitive positions, and more.
Thier said that in the year since SAP Cloud ALM’s introduction, 700 customers have adopted the approach. SAP Cloud ALM “is a full ALM suite,” Thier said, before launching into a theme echoed throughout the event: Which SAP ALM solution is best for a given customer’s environment, now and in the future?
Turning Point?
Thier acknowledged that he and SAP staff are regularly asked, “What is the turning point?” to move from one solution to another, especially from the well-tested and mature SAP Solution Manager to SAP Cloud ALM. Thier and several session speakers recommended that customers use SAP Solution Manager if IT is “heavily on premises” or if the organization is in transition to SAP S/4HANA and “you don’t want to switch horses” just yet.
On the other hand, if organizations are cloud-first or cloud maturing, SAP Cloud ALM is the answer, and it is included without charge in RISE with SAP. Several SAP experts clearly stated that running both SAP Solution Manager and SAP Cloud ALM is not recommended.
In SAP Cloud ALM Chief Product Owner Michael Kloffer’s implementation-focused discussion on ALM, he backed up Thier’s observations on SAP Cloud ALM’s strengths. “SAP Cloud ALM is a harmonized implementation experience … covering all relevant SAP solutions for all customers,” Kloffer said. He added that SAP Cloud ALM implementation will soon add SAP SuccessFactors and SAP Ariba, as well as ever-improving integrated analytics, among other elements on the road map.
The Move to Modular, Multi-Services Landscapes
On the ALM operations front, SAP Chief Service Architect Janko Budzisch said that as customers continue to face down challenges as they “move from monolithic to modular, muti-services landscapes,” SAP Cloud ALM problem management and business services management are among the evolving features and functions that are becoming “increasingly comprehensive.”
In addition to featuring the SAP Orchestra as lunch-break entertainment, the Summit format included a fireside chat session and extensive open access to SAP experts, among other speakers. In the chat, attendees asked Thier about the state of the popular Signavio solution and SAP Cloud ALM. While he acknowledged that Signavio is not currently integrated into SAP Cloud ALM, by year’s end, SAP will embed a subset of Signavio into SAP Cloud ALM to enable modeling experiences for solution-centric processes.
Meanwhile, in a separate session, SAP Chief Support Architect Nicolas Alech discussed how SAP Solution Manager already integrates Signavio and leverages the testing, analytics, and problem-solving strengths available to customers from Tricentis.