Competence Center Summit

This year's Competence Center Summit showed the opposite. More and more tasks are arising at SAP Basis. The spectrum ranges from license management and security to new programming models for modifications.

The Summit in Salzburg clearly showed that SAP Basis is still and once again a challenge for existing SAP customers. Hardly any of the participants at the summit can currently imagine how things will continue without SolMan. Solution Manager has been discontinued by SAP and there is to be Cloud ALM for future SAP cloud inventory customers. What seems logical and consistent on paper turned out to be a poorly thought-out path in many discussions in Salzburg. SAP Cloud ALM is geared to the public cloud in many areas, partly takes the private cloud into account and currently appears completely unsuitable for hybrid system landscapes. Those who continue to regard SAP's private cloud offering as an on-prem solution will therefore hardly be satisfied with Cloud ALM. One insight from the summit in Salzburg: Application Lifecycle Management (ALM) is becoming increasingly important, but SAP Cloud ALM is currently only an auxiliary function and not yet an ALM suite similar to SolMan. Whether SAP will revise the announcement of SolMan again or position Cloud ALM more precisely remained open in the discussions.

At the summit in Salzburg, it was obvious: Abap is alive. In the form of Steampunk on the SAP Business Technology Platform, private cloud users will continue to be able to modify the system in the future. To this end, Steampunk has both new functions and the loss of familiar Abap commands, as was aptly presented in a keynote. However, the further development of the Abap programming language appears necessary if SAP's demand to "Keep the Core Clean" is to apply at the same time.

Another keynote at the Summit dealt with the challenges of license management and all the legal tasks of an existing SAP customer. Due to the S/4 conversion as well as new EU regulations regarding data protection and
DSGVO many new tasks. SAP itself does not always make things easy for existing customers by concluding complex contracts in this case, because it is obviously in SAP's interest to keep new license agreements as flexible, open and non-transparent as possible. The existing SAP customer therefore has great difficulty in consolidating all options, exceptions and agreements in writing in a single contract. Without legal counsel, this challenge is almost impossible for the base to overcome.

Another topic at the summit was security, where many existing SAP customers have been waiting years for a security dashboard from SAP. In an exciting keynote speech, however, it was emphasized several times that waiting is not an option in the area of cybersecurity.

With the changing ERP operating models, the possibility of using different programming models, the challenge of the IT staff shortage and a possible answer to this by means of automation, the summit was well filled with topics. The participants were aware of the many tasks and the need to quickly find answers to a discontinued SolMan, license measurements, monitoring and automation. The next SAP Competence Center Summit will take place on June 5 and 6, 2024, again in Salzburg.