Basic solutions for release upgrades
Only a stable basis and infrastructure can guarantee an SAP system’s success. In recent years, SolMan has become the most important guarantor of innovative SAP operations. SolMan was as essential basic for SAP Basis employees, rather like a Swiss army knife, and laid the foundation for further success.
Cloud ALM
ALM is the logical metamorphosis of SolMan for a hybrid system landscape for private and public cloud. The private cloud is the answer for SAP customers with current on-prem concepts, while the public cloud will be the starting point for greenfield projects from innovative new customers. However, every type of SAP system landscape needs one or more management tools. SAP’s answer is ALM. Partners complement this offering with tools for monitoring, automation, license measurement, data management, and transport management.
Staff shortage
SAP Basis, like many others, is suffering from a staffing shortage. If the team receives some measure of relief and assistance through monitoring, test automation, automatic system copy, and other automation tools, then the critical staffing situation is likely to ease.
License management
One of the tasks of SAP Basis is to plan release upgrades, and this cannot be done with Hana and S/4 without re-evaluating licenses. Of course, SAP offers several options, but customers will need to conduct a detailed analysis of their own situation before discovering which is the best route for them. Without expert help, however, there is hardly any way forward; consulting an expert in this matter is thus highly recommended.
The fact is that the RISE offering from SAP is sold as a way to get rid of a company ‘a or an SI partner’s BASIS resources with SAP handling all the technical managed services. The numbers don’t point to this being possible. There are at least 30000 current SAP customers still on prem or in managed data centers. SAP does not have the human resource capacity to manage all of these customer’s workload in the cloud. While automation works great for multi tenant solutions to scale without having to hire more engineers, most of these existing SAP customers would be utilizing single tenant cloud solutions which don’t scale. Each single tenant SAP solution requires a high level of human system’s management.