This guest perspective was authored by Joshua Greenbaum, Principal at Enterprise Applications Consulting (EAC).
The SAP ALM Summit, held at SAP headquarters in Newtown Square last month, was more than just a showcase for new functionality in SAP Cloud Application Lifecycle Management (CALM), the flagship product in SAP’s emerging business transformation toolchain.
The summit was also a forum for highlighting many of the opportunities—and obstacles—that SAP customers face in their race to the cloud. While the event focused primarily on CALM and related methodologies, the larger issue of how SAP’s full “integrated toolchain”—CALM, Signavio, LeanIX, and WalkMe—supports business and technical migrations to the cloud was an important focus of the conference as well.
Sidebar discussions with customers, and different customer stories told on the keynote stage and in sessions, brought to the fore an important dichotomy between the two main customer cohorts in attendance. The demarcation lines between these two cohorts were defined largely by the two ALM tools that dominated the conference: CALM, clearly in ascendence as the dominant cloud-centric ALM tool in the SAP portfolio; and Solution Manager, a 20th-century ALM tool for the on-premises world that is slated to be out of maintenance support in 2027.
The SAP Cloud Application Lifecycle Management and Solution Manager Divide
The Solution Manager cohort consisted of long-standing ECC customers who attended the summit to determine whether—and, if so, how—they should start using CALM in their upgrades and migrations to S/4HANA. Many of these customers were there to understand the similarities and differences in how application lifecycle management is performed using CALM versus SAP Solution Manager, the legacy application lifecycle management tool mandated by SAP for running ECC systems.
The CALM cohort of attendees was made up of customers that have already begun to deploy CALM as part of their journey to the cloud. These customers were primarily looking for help understanding the fast-paced evolution of CALM and the rest of the “toolchain,” as well as how they could expand their use of CALM as their companies’ cloud migrations grow in number and complexity.
These two sets of customers typify the seemingly vast divide between the tens of thousands of ECC customers that haven’t yet upgraded and those that have shifted to the cloud, among them the 10,000 customers currently using CALM. The difficulty inherent in moving those ECC customers over to S/4HANA is undoubtedly one of the leading questions facing SAP, as well as ASUG and its members.
This made the question posed by an ECC customer during the “Ask Me Anything” session at the close of day one an excellent encapsulation of this divide: Why can’t we just run CALM to manage our new cloud environment and leave aside the rest of the toolchain?
The other tools cost money, this customer noted, while CALM is free, and using the rest of the toolchain only adds additional complexity to the cloud journey, he added. What the customer was really asking—which became apparent as members of the panel tried to help with an answer—was this: Why can’t we just use CALM the way we always used Solution Manager, and skip all that other stuff?
It was a question that highlighted an underlying truth about how ECC was historically implemented. In the days before the cloud changed everything, Solution Manager was deployed to ensure an ECC project was done right. Once this “ideal” system had been implemented, Solution Manager was then used to keep it in that “ideal” state, no changes wanted or needed.
The answers highlighted why this divide between old and new has to now be bridged: Implementing in the cloud means moving beyond an on-premises ERP mindset that presupposes an “ideal” ERP system is implemented once and then maintained in this ideal state for as long as possible. That is what Solution Manager did best, and that’s what this customer was hoping to do with CALM.
On the contrary, the panelists explained, this rigid, ideal state is exactly what is no longer viable in today’s business world. The opportunity presented by moving to the cloud is closely tied to a continuous rethinking and redesigning of a business and its business processes. This allows a company to remain competitive in a dynamic global business environment that has evolved significantly since ECC and other on-premises systems were first conceived. To do this requires an ALM tool like CALM, as well the business process analysis, development, and management capabilities that come from the rest of the toolchain. Solution Manager is simply the wrong tool for this new business environment.
Bridging the Divide
While this question and its answer helped to anchor the summit around the difference between the on-premises world of Solution Manager and the cloud world of CALM, important similarities emerged nonetheless. The need for more engagement with line-of-business stakeholders was an important similarity, one that came up in conversations both on and off stage.
Matthew Simoncini, Group Manager for Enterprise Applications at Panasonic, highlighted this requirement and the problems that come with approaching a cloud implementation with an on-prem SolMan mindset. Solution Manager, Simoncini noted in a keynote interview, was primarily intended for use by IT, whereas the use of CALM as an implementation “accelerator” necessitates engaging with business stakeholders, and, ideally, doing so as early as possible. “That was something I learned as we did the initial implementation,” Simoncini told the audience. “Bring businesspeople in early; don’t wait for the last minute.”
Another major commonality was evident during a packed session on how to use CALM for managing the on-going operations of S/4HANA or other cloud landscapes. Despite the fact that using CALM is currently optional, the session presented an interesting mix of Solution Manager experts looking to extend their experience and expertise to CALM and the cloud. The fact that 2027—the year that standard maintenance for ECC expires—is also the year that Solution Manager will no longer be updated or enhanced sharpened the interest of the Solution Manager experts in the room.
Also present was a sizable number of existing CALM users trying to learn how to further optimize its use. And it was clear that the interests of both sets of attendees coalesced around the question of how well CALM can scale up to manage very large deployments. For current CALM customers, the majority of whom are using it to run relatively small landscapes, the question of how to scale up reflected a maturing customer base looking to run much larger and more complex landscapes. For the existing Solution Manager customers, which was designed to scale up to manage hundreds of systems, the question of whether CALM could scale up in a similar fashion was important: Many of these customers are running very large ECC landscapes, being able to manage them at scale in the cloud was important to their cloud migration plans.
The answer given to the attendees that CALM can indeed scale up successfully, but that very large landscapes may still want a combination of CALM and SAP Focused Run, a Solution Manager “spin-off” designed for large landscapes, seemed to satisfy both sides of the room. For the Solution Manager experts, the need for Focused Run expertise assuaged some of their fears that the move to the cloud would happen too fast and leave their large landscapes without ALM support. For the CALM experts, the answer seemed to satisfy their short-term scalability needs, with the prospect of using CALM alongside Focused Run offering a path forward to run larger landscapes within a hybrid CALM/Focused Run environment when the time comes.
There was, however, a session on business process monitoring that highlighted a major difference between the different mindsets separating the on-prem world and the cloud. While Solution Manager supports business process monitoring, CALM’s integration with the rest of the toolchain, particularly SAP Signavio, takes this concept to another level by supporting the full lifecycle of a modern cloud-based process. Running in the cloud means managing processes from design to implementation to deployment to redesign and redeployment, something the cloud’s telemetry makes relatively simple. This provides a degree of specificity in business process monitoring that is completely impossible in an on-prem system.
Four Recommendations for ASUG Members
The convergence of old and new, on-prem and cloud, that was evident at the SAP ALM Summit augurs well for a healthy transition from Solution Manager to CALM and the rest of the integrated toolchain. But this transition won’t just happen by itself. Here’s four recommendations for how ASUG members can move forward with CALM while leveraging existing Solution Manager expertise:
- Prioritize mastery of CALM and the rest of the toolchain in your cloud plans, as part of your transformation planning. These tools are becoming increasingly well-integrated with the SAP Activate methodology, making CALM and the integrated toolchain even more important for project success.
- Don’t separate your CALM and Solution Manager experts or workstreams. The two tools are designed to co-exist, and for many customers that coexistence will be essential in the next two years as CALM and toolchain integration mature to where they can functionally replace Solution Manager.
- Look at using the fit-to-standard workshops that are part of Activate and CALM as a way to start the change management process and bring your business stakeholders into the cloud journey as early as possible. While the workshops normally take place as part of the Explore Phase in Activate (Phase III), these workshops can be started at the Discover Phase (Phase I) as well.
- Evangelize the benefits of CALM and the toolchain outside of your SAP stakeholder base. These tools can be used to manage business processes that span SAP and non-SAP environments, and that means that your end-to-end business processes can be supported regardless of their technological underpinnings.
This guest perspective was authored by Joshua Greenbaum, Principal at Enterprise Applications Consulting (EAC). Photo credit to Paul Kurchina.