The SolMan knows his IT trade

The SAP SolMan is one of the good ones. Very often, you will find the terms Swiss army knife, tool, toolbox, all-rounder and much more in the description of its features. These terms come from the many applications that the SolMan has to offer.

If you look at the possibilities that Solution Manager offers you, you will find many imaginative use cases. However, if you compare the presentation level with the reality level, you can see how often this extensive tool is only used one-sidedly.

Two arguments that prevent comprehensive use, according to experience, are: a lack of resources to familiarize oneself with the possibilities of Solution Manager; and in the strategic orientation of the company, one may have decided against the holistic application and use other tools for single applications that have been available for a long time.

So these two arguments often block the versatile performance of an excellent craftsman. A pity - although the potential of the SolMan is absolutely future-proof! Because especially against the background that nowadays many companies are faced with the challenge of digitizing their business processes, SolMan is gaining in importance as a holistic and central application lifecycle management tool.

A salient feature of SolMan is that SAP, as the developer and owner of the software, offers a service that many customers know little about: the Customer Connect program. The concept allows users to submit functional improvement suggestions for the further development of SolMan.

Thus, SolMan users can express change requests for the next release that would help them in their daily work. On the premise of getting enough votes from fellow users, the suggestions are submitted to and evaluated by SAP.

After that, the goal is to receive ten more customer votes that support the submitted change request. Of course, the decision to implement is ultimately up to SAP - nevertheless, the Customer Connect program makes it possible to have an active influence on the next release.

Another interesting point in the further development of the Solution Manager are the Focused Solutions. These are add-ons (still) subject to a charge that expand the functional scope of SolMan with preconfigured content.

It is extremely advantageous that SAP will waive the user fees for Focused Solutions from 2020. And even today, the great importance of the buzzword agility is evident in almost all areas.

In addition to these two criteria for agile further development, however, SolMan cannot avoid the topic of the cloud. Last year, SAP announced Cloud ALM, a product designed to provide cloud-based lifecycle management.

For this reason, it has already been feared in some quarters that Cloud ALM represents the future of Application Lifecycle Management and that the focus at SAP will therefore increasingly be on this product instead of on Solution Manager.

However, with this approach, the objective of cloud ALM must first be understood. Namely, it consists of managing cloud-based systems. However, since a large number of systems still have to be transferred to the cloud, SolMan will retain its dominance in the on-premises landscapes for the time being and Cloud ALM should rather be seen as a supplementary product in SAP's ALM portfolio.

In addition to these three factors, there will certainly be a large number of other exciting topics in the future that offer potential for improvement and innovation and will continue to shape the path of the Solution Manager in the distant future. In order to keep him agile as a professional in the face of growing demands and challenges. Like a craftsman who understands and masters his trade...