Toolbox for the IT jungle

Whether you're a midsize company or a global corporation, there's hardly a company today that can do without automated processes. Sales and production have long been just as networked as customer service, finance and human resources management. Everywhere, information technology is paving the way for seamless collaboration - across departments and operations.

This makes it all the more important for IT managers to keep all solutions and applications under control - across all IT silos.

IT management tools help here. They provide a better overview and thus more security in the company-wide IT jungle. Problems and security gaps can be quickly identified, analyzed and remedied.

This is one of the reasons why three out of four companies now rely on corresponding solutions to manage their IT processes.

Holistic management tool

A bulging toolbox, which is continuously expanded by Support Package stacks and Feature Packs, helps to SAP-The company helps its customers efficiently monitor, control and keep their enterprise applications up to date.

As a central management platform, Solution Manager connects different systems, makes service and support processes transparent and accelerates them. Numerous customers already appreciate this.

"By using Solution Manager, we have been able to reduce the average processing time of service desk requests and achieve a 100 percent increase in transparency to do so"

praises Marieta Silter, Division Head SAP Administration and Operation at Sartorius Corporate Administration. Another advantage is that provision and use of the SAP Solution Manager are included in the annual SAP-maintenance fees covered.

This is one of the reasons why approximately 60 percent of all SAP-customers rely on Solution Manager for application management. To date, however, use has often been limited to standard features for maintenance and upgrades or individual tools such as incident management, change request management, test management or system monitoring. However, the overall potential of the management platform was rarely exploited by the companies.

"Yet it's the integration of the individual modules that really adds value."

Johannes Hurst, spokesman for the Solution Manager Working Group at the German-speaking SAP User group (DSAG).

With the availability of Release 7.1 in the summer of 2011, the tool set completed the step from duty to freestyle and transformed from an unloved tool to a holistic management platform.

For the first time, in addition to SAP-systems can now also be used by nonSAP-systems via the platform. In addition, the new Solution Manager is characterized by comprehensive orchestration functions, diverse Dashboards and a more user-friendly interface.

All-round view of IT

The new tool set has been consistently adapted to the requirements of the ITIL-Standards (IT Infrastructure Library) adapted. This enables CIOs to involve business units in the planning and implementation of new IT projects, accelerate projects and improve the overall agility of IT.

Currently, the management platform is considered to be the only application in the world that provides for all 15 processes a ITIL-certification - this also makes it clear that the SAP-toolbox is ideal for controlling enterprise-wide IT processes.

"In summary, Solution Manager's module and data integration capabilities are compelling, making it a milestone in business-IT alignment"

underlines Marc Köhler, who, on the part of the independent management consultancy Serview, is responsible for the ITIL-certification.

The integrated SAP IT Infrastructure Management based on the Realtech-TheGuard! software provides an all-round view of the entire IT landscape. At the same time, companies benefit within the scope of Change Request Management (ChaRM) from Best Practiceswhich can be effortlessly adapted to individual company processes.

System monitoring has also been enhanced: Solution Manager 7.1 replaces the conventional CCMS scenario with the new Monitoring and Alerting Infrastructure (MAI), whose configuration steps are implemented in the SAP Composite Application Framework (CAF) as a so-called Guided Procedure.

Since December 2013, standard support customers have also been able to use the new technologies. For Enterprise Support customers, MAI also offers a wide range of new control and reporting functionalities, such as BW reporting and Dashboards.

Solution Manager 7.1 delivers enhanced support for SAP Mobile as well as monitoring and alerting for Hana.

Get maintenance through upgrade

To benefit from this, companies should upgrade to version 7.1 of the management tool now at the latest. In addition to the improved functionality, the fact that the end of mainstream maintenance for the previous versions was announced in December 2013 also speaks in favor of the changeover.

Since SAP does not offer extended maintenance for Release 7.0, companies have the following alternatives:

• You do without SAP-maintenance and thus accept serious security risks.
• You conclude a fee-based customer-specific maintenance contract with SAP from.
• You switch to SAP Solution Manager 7.1 and continue to benefit from the extensive support and maintenance services offered by the SAP.

In the medium term, the majority of the SAP-users will hardly be able to bypass the new release of the management platform. After all, Solution Manager has long since become much more than a useful tool for monitoring and adapting existing SAP-Systems.

In fact, the new release covers all key areas of IT - from implementation to go-live and operation to continuous application optimization. This is one of the reasons why the central solution for application lifecycle management and the operation of software solutions is now regarded by many companies as the "single source of truth".

In any case, the various functionalities should be converted step by step to ensure undisturbed productive operation. A close look at individual needs and processes is indispensable in the run-up to the changeover.

The release change is not just a purely technical upgrade. As with a usual SAP-When upgrading, the focus must be on process adjustments and the implementation of new functions. Here, certified consulting partners such as Realtech SAP customers with a roadmap for building a ITIL-compliant IT process mapping.

Customers using SAP Enterprise Support, Premium Engagement, and SAP Product Support for Large Enterprises can take advantage of Expert Guided Implementation Sessions at no additional cost as part of their support agreement.

All this enables SAP-customers the fast and uncomplicated upgrade to the latest version of the application management solution. Reason enough to take this important step as quickly as possible.