There are different approaches to ALM. Some customers prefer to run their applications using a standardized low-cost approach, while others have individual ALM requirements. Some customers use just a few SAP components, while others have landscapes with more than 100 SAP components. Then there are SAP customers that do not have SAP components at all, but only use cloud applications from SAP.

To satisfy the different customer expectations, SAP provides multiple ALM offerings:

Application Lifecycle Management (ALM) from SAP provides processes, tools, best practices, and services to manage SAP and non-SAP solutions throughout the complete application lifecycle.

Managing the application lifecycle covers multiple phases:

• Requirements – Collect business demand regarding new or changed business processes
• Design – Convert requirements into detailed specifications
• Build & Test – Configure the applications and check if they match the requirements
• Deploy – Transfer changes from a test environment into the live business
• Operate – Provide services required for ongoing operations
• Optimize – Analyze service-level fulfillment and perform any activities required to improve results

It is a long tradition at SAP to support customers in executing these tasks. As part of the support engagement, SAP provides tools, methodologies, and best practices that help to achieve faster time-to-market, to avoid business disruptions, to increase efficiency of IT operations, and to provide transparency of the entire IT landscape.