SAP Cloud ALM

The idea of application lifecycle management

Complex structures require multifunctional IT tools. For SAP R/3 and ECC 6.0, SolMan (SAP Solution Manager) was the measure of all things. SolMan is the Swiss army knife for the CCoE manager (formerly CCC, Customer Competence Center, currently CCoE, Customer Center of Expertise).

Many tasks have changed with cloud computing, new challenges have been added and SAP has taken over and acquired IT companies. Cloud ALM will be available in future to manage the lifecycle of SAP's ERP components. It will be a suite of coordinated functional modules - currently it is still a dysfunctional collection of IT tools, concepts and ideas.

SAP currently combines the functions of Signavio, LeanIX and WalkMe through to automated testing under Cloud ALM. It is a good idea, but not yet a consolidated platform for the administration and management of hybrid and cloud landscapes. SAP partners have already started developing alternative concepts and applications - cloud ALM no longer has a unique selling point!

Test, test, test in an SAP infrastructure

Testing and thus checking the ERP system for consistency and correctness has always been the task of the SAP customer's basic team. There used to be a release change every few years and a long weekend at Christmas or Easter was used as a time window for testing.

Cloud has changed everything: If new updates, release changes and maintenance jobs occur on a monthly basis, then the existing SAP customer must also adapt their test strategy to this. Cloud ALM therefore has its own function for automated testing so that this is synchronized with the ERP updates.

Opinions on automated testing in the context of SAP Cloud ALM vary widely in the SAP community: there are those who claim that automated testing is hardly possible in a complex SAP ERP landscape, while others say that all testing issues have largely been resolved. The truth will probably lie somewhere in the middle and AI will once again shake up the testing tool scene.

ALM platform versus specialization

Cloud ALM should be a platform with a consolidated user interface and orchestrated data management. But the IT functions of the SAP acquisitions Signavio, LeanIX and WalkMe are naturally part of SAP's ALM suite, but still far from interacting harmoniously with each other: The Enterprise Architect from LeanIX has little knowledge of the process mining from Signavio. And WalkMe, the most recent acquisition, still has to find its role.

This opens up the market for third-party providers: Some SAP partners have created their own concepts and IT tools for managing an ERP cloud infrastructure. The topic of ALM has thus arrived in the SAP community, but SAP Cloud ALM still has a long way to go.