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:
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.
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:
SAP Solution Manager is the well-established ALM platform of SAP. It is an on-premise solution to support on-premise applications as well as hybrid landscapes. The rich functional portfolio supports all aspects of ALM. Customers can select those functions of the “swiss-army knife” they require. And they can configure them individually to their individual needs.
SAP Cloud ALM is for customers that use only (or at least predominantly) cloud solutions from SAP, and do not want to deploy their own ALM platform on-premise for managing these applications. It is a brand-new solution built on modern cloud technology. The first version of Cloud ALM is scheduled to be available in Q4/2018 and will be enhanced on an ongoing basis.
Focused Solutions for SAP Solution Manager are turnkey pre-configurations of SAP Solution Manager. They are highly-integrated and automated. Focused Solutions deliver all you need and include additional features, dashboards and all related training.
SAP provides cloud extensions of SAP Solution Manager as well. These are cloud services that are accessible both from the other ALM offerings, or directly through the SAP ONE Support Launchpad. Main use cases for the cloud extensions are access to up-to-date content and delivery of latest support services without needing to update the on-premise ALM tools.
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