Software Asset Management: Do It Again, SAM!

Each country has its own language version of the unmistakable slogan. "Do it again, Sam!" is - slightly distorted - one of the most famous quotes in movie history. "Do it again, SAM" - fits our new software asset management solution (SAM) for SAP: Dynamic License Control, the third generation is in the starting blocks. Honico developed the first generation of Dynamic License Control (DLC) back in 2006: a product for SAP license management and optimization that rapidly became the market leader in the SAP environment and was acquired by Flexera in 2009. A few years later, the second generation was created and with it a new cooperation between Honico and Intelligent Licensing as a venture capital company in the USA. Intelligent Licensing was acquired by Snow Software in 2014 and has been operating successfully there ever since, and we are now pleased to present the third generation - Next Gen Dynamic License Control.

In times when SAP license management is becoming a science and product and license metrics change completely when switching to the S/4 world; product inconsistencies emerge that lead to costly license conversions; resources and know-how become scarce; the relationship between the old (ECC) and the new (S/4) world becomes increasingly difficult to understand, for example due to extensive and comprehensive changes to the Price and Conditions List (PKL); and where Full Use Equivalents (FUE) are available for the switch to the cloud, usage rights have to be recompiled.

All this cries out for a new, fast solution; a solution that unites and maps both the Abap and non-Abap worlds. In these times, we silverbacks are once again having great fun reinventing SAP license management: It has always been our goal to cover all requirements for advanced software asset management (SAM) while ensuring ease of use. 

The cloud trend cannot be reversed: the fact that SAP, unlike all relevant players (Microsoft, Infor, Oracle, Salesforce, etc.), is the only company to permanently commit to on-prem is not in line with reality, even if SAP's approach is certainly questionable: there is no modern system architecture today without the cloud.

Dynamic License Control (DLC) is started from the browser and has simple and transparent queries in the database at the heart of the new solution. The customer-specific queries create a high level of transparency and flexibility. At this point, most tool providers have a rigid set of rules or rules that are difficult to adapt to their specific needs and, in case of doubt, act like a black box.

In my E3 licensing column from October 2023, I wrote about the need for a SAM tool for SAP, because although the new S/4 licensing model with its cloud-based applications offers some advantages, the need for license management and optimization in the context of SAM naturally remains, because with S/4 Hana, existing SAP customers become transparent. SAP is no longer reliant on user self-disclosure for both the measurement of permitted user types and compliance issues. Instead, SAP automatically determines SAP usage and confronts its customers with the results.

Honico covers complex and time-consuming tasks that SAP users cannot or do not want to handle themselves due to a lack of resources, time and knowledge. DLC is the solution that simplifies the complex, automates the manual and combines all SAM tasks in one tool. In other words: We democratize SAM by making advanced features and best-practice rules available to everyone. Beyond compliance and optimization, an essential new task of a SAM tool is to verify SAP's (and other vendors') performance reports. Be it a non-tap tool such as Ariba or the much-cited "STAR Service":

Furthermore, the Authorization Object Analyzer (SAP Note 311338) does not reveal which authorizations are the cause of the assignment of a high-priced license type. User consolidation must then be laboriously carried out manually. What is worse, however, is that SAP's STAR report completely ignores all sub-profiles, which leads to incorrect user classification: The problem is that authorizations can also be assigned via profiles, not just roles. However, profiles do not have to contain the authorizations directly, but can also inherit these authorizations via sub-profiles. A simple example of this is the SAP_ALL profile. This profile contains 23 sub-profiles and only inherits its authorizations via these sub-profiles. However, the STAR report from SAP now completely ignores all subprofiles.