Healthy licensing landscape
How do customers achieve a healthy SAP licensing landscape that takes into account and highly effectively optimizes their licenses?
With Hana Enterprise Cloud (IaaS), Hana Cloud Platform (PaaS) and SAP SaaS applications such as Hybris, Ariba, SuccessFactors, Fieldglass or Concur, SAP offers replacements for the classic on-premise implementation.
In principle, using SaaS solutions brings great advantages, because they can be introduced within a very short time. Customers use SAP's best-practice integration scenarios and supplement them with the necessary requirements of their company.
It is no longer necessary to invest in or install additional hardware or software. Furthermore, scaling can be carried out at any time according to the respective requirements.
This not only relieves the burden on IT, but also supports the business departments in their flexibility to adapt more and more quickly to ever-changing requirements.
The acid test for SAM providers
But as a rule, each solution implies its own independent license or cost model. However, SAP does not offer its customers a solution that would enable centralized cross-application management.
Keeping an overview in this situation and not flying blind is an almost hopeless undertaking without additional tool support.
What must a tool-supported SAM solution for SAP licenses be able to do? It should integrate the classic licensing models of the on-premise world and at the same time be able to cover the increasingly dynamic market of cloud scenarios.
To do this, it needs the ability to build metrics that reflect the complexity of the contract framework and are aligned with the company's contract needs. And it should be able to interpret and use gray areas in SAP contracts positively in the customer's interest.
No isolated "license treatment
Looking at individual applications, such as SuccessFactors, in isolation does not go far enough. A good tool therefore not only provides an optimization proposal for a single application. It provides an optimization preview across all modules.
This can create a license and cost situation in which there is complete and consistent transparency at all times about current costs, license volumes and actual requirements. "Linking" is the decisive capability here.
Know side effects
Of course, this presupposes that the SAM provider knows SAP's contractual terms and conditions. Just as if they were the package insert for a drug on which a lot depends for the company.
As practice shows, this is of enormous importance: very quickly, millions can be at stake. An expert should therefore know exactly about the side effects that result from each individual optimization measure for other areas.
Only those who have previously analyzed and interpreted the contract constellations can ultimately certify complete license health with a clear conscience.
Approaches to optimization
SAM solutions from Aspera, for example, consistently deliver new optimization approaches for the company's current situation. They go beyond a mere presentation of the data.
They are the basis for top performance in license management. This is the only way that companies will succeed today and in the future in really not leaving any costs untouched. Neither on premise nor in the cloud.
