SAP Cloud ALM is the Application Lifecycle Management (ALM) offering for cloud-centric customers. ALM means supporting customers throughout the entire life cycle of their IT solution. It covers both the implementation and the operations of, for example, SAP S/4HANA Cloud.
Implementation
- Design your to-be business processes.
- Build the corresponding configuration and extensions.
- Test if the set-up works as designed.
- Deploy the settings to the production to use it for running your business.
Operations
- Detect if any incidents have occurred.
- Analyze the root-cause of incidents.
- Correct the identified problem.
- Automate recurring activities.
SAP Cloud ALM is a cloud service available for all cloud customers of SAP. It is included in your cloud subscription – you own it already! Benefits are three-fold:
- Accelerate time-to-value by shortening the implementation project.
- Safeguard business continuity and hence reducing cost of downtime.
- Reduce cost of implementation and operations of SAP S/4HANA Cloud.
And there is just another important fact to mention for customers that use SAP S/4HANA Cloud, not as a stand-alone solution, but want to integrate it with other SAP cloud services (e.g. SAP SuccessFactors) or on-premise solutions. SAP Cloud ALM serves as central ALM platform for integrated solutions, including hybrid solutions, and you can use it for implementation and operations in parallel. It is your ALM single source of truth.
There are different versions of SAP S/4HANA Cloud:
- SAP S/4HANA Cloud: leverage cloud benefits in the public cloud, use predefined standardized processes.
- SAP S/4HANA Cloud, private edition: gain more flexibility than public edition (functional scope, change, extensibility, etc.)
SAP Cloud ALM takes care of both versions.
Let us look at the value that SAP Cloud ALM provides. We can divide the value into three main categories.
SAP Cloud ALM accelerates time-to-value in the below mentioned ways.
SAP Cloud ALM safeguard’s business continuity in the below mentioned ways.
SAP Cloud ALM reduces the cost of ownership in the following ways.
Both SAP Cloud ALM and SAP Solution Manager support implementation projects, but there is no feature parity. Which one should you use?
Here are some questions to answer:
- Do you plan to focus on implementing SAP standard processes or is your focus more on parallel projects, including maintenance?
- Are you looking for strong methodology support for fit-to-standard, or is your project development-driven with custom code and retrofit?
- Is manual testing sufficient, or do you plan to include automated tests?
- Is deployment orchestration for cloud and ABAP enough, or do you have advanced change control needs?
Your answer to these questions will give you some general guidance on whether SAP Cloud ALM fits.
All three ALM solutions of SAP (SAP Solution Manager, SAP Cloud ALM, and SAP Focused Run) support SAP S/4HANA Cloud! What is the recommended ALM solution for you?
The advantage of SAP Cloud ALM is that it is cloud native SaaS solution.. You do not need to provide hardware or pay for a hyperscaler., and you do not need to care about operating and maintaining it.
SAP recommends using SAP Cloud ALM as ALM solution for SAP S/4HANA Cloud. It provides substantial support for implementation and operations (see following lessons).
SAP S/4HANA Cloud, private edition provides some more flexibility than SAP S/4HANA Cloud.
SAP Cloud ALM supports SAP S/4HANA Cloud, private edition as well. However, there are some cases where more ALM functionality is required. Depending on your planned usage of SAP S/4HANA Cloud, private edition, we recommend to evaluate if the available and upcoming functions of SAP Cloud ALM are sufficient for you.
Very large customers of SAP and service providers can use their SAP Focused Run for operations of SAP S/4HANA Cloud as well.
SAP will continue to enhance the functional scope of SAP Cloud ALM.