Decide between SAP Solution Manager and SAP Cloud ALM

[marbeth_chavezw]

What are key criteria to decide whether to use SAP Solution Manager or SAP Cloud ALM?

[marbeth_chavezw]

SAP Cloud ALM is positioned as go-to ALM solution. The functional scope is comparable in many areas. And using SAP Cloud ALM is much more favorable from the cost perspective. Customers do not need to take care of hardware investments, technical operations and maintenance of the system, and maintenance of agents used for connecting to the managed systems or tenants. And customers without an on-premise SAP maintenance agreement have no SAP Solution Manager usage rights. They can obtain them only via a corresponding subscription at SAP Enterprise Cloud Services (ECS).

However, there are cases where the functionality of SAP Cloud ALM is not sufficient for a customer:

• Regulatory compliance and Data Privacy requirements might apply that SAP Cloud ALM cannot currently support (e.g. NS2, GxP, FDA).
• The customer has complex system landscapes that SAP Cloud ALM cannot support today (e.g.: dual landscape maintenance, retrofit, downgrade protection).
• Strong governance of the implementation project is required.
• The customer needs other functionality urgently that is available in SAP Solution Manager but not in SAP Cloud ALM or an integrated tool. See the Transition Center for details.

In these cases, SAP recommends using SAP Solution Manager as ALM platform.

[noel_d]

Regarding the on-prem customers ; in most cases in which the customer has (a) large on-prem system(s) only, SAP Solution Manager would be preferable (relating to lines 3 & 4 of your reply).

If the system landscape is very big, and provided they all run on HANA, SAP Focused Run would be preferable over SAP Solution Manager which would run into its limitations in such a landscape.

You also have to look at it from an SAP partner point of view. For example : for one of our customers, we use SAP Focused Run to monitor an on-prem S4 system, although this customer is only present in one jurisdiction, with only a few company codes and a fairly limited scope (a considerable data-volume is the only 'anomaly' in this picture). 'We" is in this case a platinum SAP partner, and to monitor & service a wide range of on-prem systems of customers, the obvious choice for systems on HANA -databases is Focused Run.

[noel_d]

Below the picture excluding SAP Focused Run