SAP Cloud ALM is a fully integrated ALM suite for cloud-centric small, medium and larger customers that is completely re-thought, re-designed, and re-built on SAP Business Technology Platform. It supports all components of an intelligent enterprise and can manage implementation and operations of cloud and hybrid solutions.
It is available for immediate consumption with an average onboarding time of 15 minutes and is a very comprehensive and cost efficient Application Lifecycle Management (ALM) solution for all customers.
If you are a customer who has been using SAP Solution Manager for your ALM requirements so far you might already be aware of the end of mainstream maintenance in 2027 in line with that of SAP Business Suite. Post 2027, if you opt for extended maintenance on SAP Business Suite, you receive extended maintenance on the implementation capabilities of SAP Solution Manager until 2030 with further customer specific maintenance options thereafter.
Naturally, this brings the question “What can a Solution Manager customer do now?” Below are some recommendations from SAP.
- Adopt SAP Cloud ALM for operations now as it is quite mature. Add SAP Focused Run if SAP Cloud ALM is not sufficient
- If you are using SAP Solution Manager for implementation, continue to use it to complete your move to SAP S/4HANA or if SAP Cloud ALM for implementation is not sufficient (yet)
Below are some questions you might want to consider to help make a decision on what is the right fit for your organisation:
- What is your overall IT strategy? – Are you considering moving to the cloud? If yes, is it private or public cloud? Remember that SAP Solution Manager usage rights (1) is included with an active on-premise maintenance contract. If you have a cloud first strategy, SAP Cloud ALM might be the way to go.
- What is your solution landscape? – Check the Supported Solutions (2) to understand if SAP Cloud ALM supports the solutions in your landscape.
- What are the ALM costs? – Here you can consider the cost associated with acquiring the ALM tool and the ongoing maintenance.
Fair usage rights of SAP Cloud ALM is included with any of SAP’s cloud subscription (except Concur only) or with a valid maintenance contract. It’s a cloud native solution which means that the maintenance is taken care of by SAP and you don’t have to worry about the upgrades, hardware sizing etc making it very cost efficient.
In contract, SAP Solution Manager usage rights is included with an active on-premise maintenance contract and you need to factor the hardware and ongoing upgrades and other maintenance costs.
- Which ALM functions do you need? – Here we need to evaluate what ALM capabilities are needed for your organisation. For example, if you are a long time user of SAP Solution Manager and are extensively using Change Request Management with detailed approval workflows where transports move between systems based on the status of approval, then SAP Solution Manager might still be the right option for now.
- What is your timeline? - SAP Cloud ALM has a very aggressive roadmap expanding the support to more solutions made possible by daily deployments and fortnightly feature releases.
If a functionality or a feature is currently unavailable, have a look at the Roadmap Explorer (3) and see if this timelines meets the requirements of your organisation.
You might also be wondering how SAP plans to support you in this transition to SAP Cloud ALM? Below are some services/enablement resources already available or in roadmap.
- Services to understand, implement and use SAP Cloud ALM
These services and enablement resources (4) help customers to get familiar with SAP Cloud ALM and ramp up their knowledge on how to adopt and use SAP Cloud ALM
- Services to support the transition planning to SAP Cloud ALM (5)
To help prepare customers for the transition, SAP plans to make available a SAP Readiness Check for SAP Cloud ALM. This is a new and tailored scenario to provide a cloud self-service to support SAP Solution Manager customers in the planning and scoping of the transition from SAP Solution Manager to SAP Cloud ALM. By analyzing the usage of an SAP Solution Manager system, it addresses the following questions:
Which capabilities are used in SAP Solution Manager?
What are equivalent capabilities in SAP Cloud ALM?
What is the planning / delivery status of the equivalent capability in SAP Cloud ALM?
Where to find all necessary information for the relevant capabilities in SAP Cloud ALM?
Are there any relevant capabilities only available in SAP Cloud ALM?
- Services to support the selective data transfer to SAP Cloud ALM (6)
While no synchronization of content between SAP Cloud ALM and SAP Solution Manager 7.2 is planned, SAP plans to provide a stepwise data transition for selective content with which a customer can perform a one-time content data transfer. This is planned to provided via specific reports in SAP Solution Manager 7.2 for seamless data transfer to SAP Cloud ALM.
I hope this blog gives you a start towards how you can prepare for the transition from SAP Solution Manager to SAP Cloud ALM.
Additional Reading
- Usage Rights of SAP Solution Manager and SAP Cloud ALM
- Supported Solutions
- SAP Cloud ALM Roadmap
- Enablement and interaction channels
- SAP Readiness Check (planned)
- Selective data transfer (planned)
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For more information on SAP Cloud ALM, please check out the SAP Enterprise Support Value Maps* - Application Lifecycle Management and enroll yourself in the SAP Cloud ALM Learning Program.
Please be aware that one time registration is required to access the Value Map. You can register or join the SAP ES Value Maps
here.
*Please see program entitlement
here
