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ALM - Questions & Answers

This page provides a collection of frequently asked questions and related answers collected at various customer events regarding Application Lifecycle Management (ALM).

For an extensive collection of questions and answers regarding ALM and the corresponding products, please refer to the ALM Questions & Answers list.

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Cross-Topics

Application lifecycle management (ALM) comprises the processes, tools, and services required to manage SAP and third-party solutions. As part of your maintenance contract, SAP provides autonomous ALM solutions that help our customers ensure business continuity, reduce operation and implementation costs, and accelerate time to market.

SAP Solution Manager is the established ALM platform of SAP. It is provided to customers as part of their support engagement. Customers use it throughout all phases of the application life cycle (requirements, design, build & test, deploy, operate, and optimize). And it allows customers to gain the holistic view of their IT solution. SAP Solution Manager is installed on premise, but it can manage cloud applications as well.

SAP Solution Manager is a one-size-fits-all ALM solution. It is very successful in the market. It supports customers with an on-premise focus very well. But what about cloud-only, cloud-first, and cloud centric customers? Is on-premise ALM the best solution for them? Not really.

Therefore, SAP provides another ALM offering “SAP Cloud ALM” for exactly these customers to help them run their business better. The cloud solution for application lifecycle management is a separate solution. It has a different functional scope. And different contracts between SAP and the customer apply. However, some of the available services might be used by both products.

SAP offers three strategic ALM solutions. They target at different target groups:

  • SAP Cloud ALM provides standardized ALM processes with the focus on requirements of cloud-centric customers. Some on-premise products of SAP are not supported by SAP Cloud ALM.
  • SAP Solution Manager supports customer-individual ALM processes for on-premise and hybrid solutions.
  • SAP Focused Run is designed for businesses that need high-volume system and application monitoring, alerting, and analytics. It addresses service providers and customers with advanced needs.

There is no functional parity between SAP Cloud ALM, SAP Solution Manager, and SAP Focused Run.

RISE with SAP contracts include SAP Enterprise Support, Cloud Editions. And this includes an entitlement for SAP Cloud ALM. RISE with SAP customers can request and use their own SAP Cloud ALM tenant without additional license or subscription fee. However, the agreement does not include usage rights for SAP Solution Manager. If customers want to use SAP Solution Manager for RISE with SAP, they have to either have a valid on-premise SAP maintenance contract (which includes usage rights for SAP Solution Manager). Or they have to subscribe to a special SAP S/4HANA Cloud package “SAP Solution Manager for SAP S/4HANA Cloud”.

SAP Focused Run supports RISE with  SAP as well. However, it is not included in any SAP maintenance agreement. It has to be licensed separately.

With the go live of the SAP S/4HANA Cloud system, your maintenance agreement will be switched from an on-premise maintenance contract to SAP Enterprise Support, Cloud Editions. You can continue using SAP Solution Manager during the transition project. But you will lose the usage rights at the go live, unless you have another valid SAP on-premise maintenance agreement in addition.

SAP Cloud ALM and SAP Solution Manager both support hybrid landscapes. However, they have different customer groups in focus.

SAP Solution Manager is targeting on-premise-centric customers with a fit gap mindset.

SAP Cloud ALM is for cloud-centric customers with a fit to standard mindset.

SAP Focused Run is relevant for service providers, high-end hybrid customers, and customers with advanced needs, which go beyond SAP Solution Manager.

Both SAP Solution Manager and SAP Cloud ALM are covered by SAP maintenance. Customers with a valid on-premise maintenance contract can use SAP Solution Manager without paying an additional license for it. SAP Cloud ALM is provided for all customers with SAP Enterprise Support, Cloud Editions (included in SAP cloud subscriptions) or SAP Enterprise Support.

Only SAP Focused Run is an own price-list item that needs to be licensed.

SAP Cloud ALM

Based on SAP Business Technology Platform, the solution supports the application lifecycle management (ALM) of our intelligent solution suite and offers standardized ALM functions focused on operational efficiency. Take control of the configuration, deployment, and management of your business processes with the SAP Cloud ALM solution.

Customers can request their own SAP Cloud ALM tenant for free if they have a valid SAP Enterprise Support maintenance contract, or SAP Enterprise Support, Cloud Editions included in their cloud subscription.

Just click the Request button on the SAP Cloud ALM home page and follow the instructions.

Please browse the list of features in SAP Help Portal.

Please see the list of supported solutions.

SAP Solution Manager

With SAP Solution Manager, you can cover the complete application lifecycle of your IT landscape. The solution provides innovative functionalities that can help transform your business faster by streamlining your business processes, addressing improvement options, increasing operational efficiency, and minimizing risk. Implement and operate your business applications and configure them to your individual needs.

The usage rights for SAP Solution Manager are included in the on-premise SAP maintenance contracts. Customers of SAP with such a valid maintenance contract are entitled to download and use SAP Solution Manager.

Focused Build and Focused Insights are included in an add on for SAP Solution Manager 7.2. The add on is included in the usage rights of SAP Solution Manager. Customers can use the functionality without any additional license.

Build Focused Build for SAP Solution Manager supports customers with a seamless, tool-based, requirements-to-deploy process. For this purpose, Focused Build provides pre-configured standard SAP Solution Manager features and processes, as well as additional build functions.

Focused Insights for SAP Solution Manager incorporates the best practices and experience gained from numerous custom projects to offer you a set of pre-packaged dashboards tailored to your needs.

SAP Solution Manager 7.2 follows the maintenance approach of SAP Business Suite 7. Mainstream maintenance for SAP Solution Manager 7.2 is offered until the end of 2027. This applies for the Focused Build and Focused Insights add on as well. Extended maintenance is an option available until end of 2030 for selected functionality (see below). 

Customers who choose the optional extended maintenance for SAP Business Suite 7 (until end of 2030) will receive extended maintenance for SAP Solution Manager 7.2 at no additional cost.

Extended maintenance for SAP Solution Manager 7.2 only includes requirements management, project management, process management, test suite, change control management, IT service management (ITSM) and landscape management. For further details, see SAP Note 3255311.

SAP provide various offerings to support the transition from SAP Solution Manager to SAP Cloud ALM, like:

  • Readiness Check for SAP Cloud ALM*
  • Transition Methodology to SAP Cloud ALM*
  • Roadmap and Implementation Services
  • Tools for selected data transfer of solution documentation and test cases*
  • APIs for data transfer and 3rd-party integration
  • Guidance for typical customer situations
  • “Transition to SAP Cloud ALM” page in the SAP Support Portal*

Entries marked with an *asterisk are planned to be provided in the future.

No. Customers with on-prem SAP maintenance agreements retain the perpetual license for SAP Solution Manager. They can continue using SAP Solution Manager after end of mainstream or extended maintenance.

SAP Solution Manager 7.2 will be supported beyond 2027/2030 – in customer specific maintenance (see restrictions in SAP Note 52505 and 305372).

No, SAP does not plan to offer a successor.

SAP offers Extended Maintenance of SAP Solution Manager 7.2 to support customers in their transformation from SAP Business Suite to SAP S/4HANA. The purpose of this is to avoid customers need to switch their ALM platform during the migration project. For more information, please refer to SAP Note 3255311.

The mandatory use of SAP Solution Manager has been included in SAP support contracts in the past due to technical reasons. These technical reasons do not exist anymore. Therefore, this contract clause has lapsed. The corresponding contract term is planned to be removed from new SAP support agreements in the future.

The support variant ‘SAP Standard Support’ is a traditional one, which applies to some customers only, mainly in Germany, Austria, and Switzerland. SAP does not plan to include usage rights for SAP Cloud ALM in these maintenance agreements.

SAP Cloud ALM usage rights are included in the SAP Cloud Service subscription and in SAP Enterprise Support only. The scope encompassed to SAP Enterprise Support is also valid for Product Support for Large Enterprises and our premium engagements SAP ActiveAttention, and SAP MaxAttention.

Customers have a perpetual license for SAP Solution Manager as part of their SAP on-premise maintenance agreements. They can continue using SAP Solution Manager beyond 2027/2030 under customer-specific maintenance.

We plan to keep the ABAP Stack on 7.40. It will remain in mainstream maintenance until December 31, 2027 and followed by optional extended maintenance. See also SAP Note 1648480.

SAP Focused Run

Increase the efficiency of IT operations and minimize the total cost of ownership with an advanced operation solution optimized to support highly scalable, secure, and efficient IT operations. Targeted for SAP-centric service providers and high-end hybrid customers, the SAP Focused Run solution monitors IT infrastructures, users, integrations and associated events, and business service management tools.

SAP Focused Run is a separate product on the SAP price list. All customers that license SAP Focused Run are entitled to use it.

SAP Focused Run is already available for both customers and Service providers.  For service providers it is the tool for hosting all their customers in one central platform for monitoring. And customers can use SAP Focused Run if they need advanced monitoring (scalability, AI/ML Use case today) and other advanced monitoring like single message monitoring in Integration Monitoring (millions of messages ) or real user monitoring (which is not available in SAP Solution Manager).

SAP Cloud ALM is intended for cloud-centric solutions. This means on-premise-centric solutions will be only covered to a certain degree. This means you should consider SAP Focused Run for end-user or integration scenarios covering on-prem and cloud-based components. SAP Cloud ALM for Operations should be considered for pure cloud-centric solutions.

Tricentis Test Automation for SAP

Our customers are looking for one test automation for the Intelligent Suite and their larger end-to-end customer solution including non-SAP. Neither Component-Based Test Automation (CBTA) in SAP Solution Manager nor the test automation tool in SAP S/4HANA Cloud are supporting all our cloud products holistically.

By entering a strategic partnership, SAP gets immediate access to all Tricentis Test Automation assets. All our on-premise SAP Enterprise Support customers get a free term license for Tricentis Test Automation for SAP integrated with SAP Solution Manager. By reselling Tricentis for an extended, non-SAP scope, customers get in combination with SAP Solution Manager or SAP Cloud ALM an enterprise-grade test suite.

Customers can benefit from one enterprise test solution with a strong service provider ecosystem. With our plan to make SAP internal test content available to customers in SAP Cloud ALM, customers will be able to accelerate their release regression testing. The partnership is very well received by our customer and partner ecosystem. 

SAP Cloud ALM will integrate both tools, the test automation from SAP S/4HANA Cloud and Tricentis. Tricentis will be able to automate other cloud products (SAP SuccessFactors, SAP Ariba, SAP Concur), which cannot be done with the SAP S/4HANA Cloud test automation tool. This provides a fantastic opportunity to our customers. But no one is forced to use it.

Partners

SAP PartnerEdge offers test and demo licenses. SAP Enterprise Support, cloud editions is included. This includes SAP Cloud ALM.

SAP Cloud ALM isn't prepared from technical as well as legal perspective for AMS partner business. This means in particular, you can't run multiple customers in a SAP Cloud ALM tenant owned by the AMS partner. Our clear recommendation is SAP Focused Run as platform for AMS providers.