With the Appli­ca­tion Life­cy­cle Man­age­ment (ALM) Vir­tu­al Sum­mit set for next month, keynote speak­ers will soon final­ize their remarks. SAP SVP of Appli­ca­tion Life­cy­cle Man­age­ment Marc Thi­er, who will lead a Sum­mit keynote pan­el, recent­ly talked with ASUG about the event’s impor­tance. In addi­tion to giv­ing SAP experts an oppor­tu­ni­ty to con­vey prod­uct strat­e­gy, direc­tion, and detail, Thi­er said that the vir­tu­al event gives cus­tomers a feed­back chan­nel and access to ALM experts and innovators.

For more on Thier’s obser­va­tions and insights, ASUG offers this edit­ed ver­sion of a recent interview.

Q. In your role, what are you hear­ing from cus­tomers regard­ing cur­rent busi­ness and tech­nol­o­gy chal­lenges relat­ed to ALM?

A. What I hear from cus­tomers is they strug­gle with inte­gra­tion, and that the cost of imple­men­ta­tion and time to val­ue is too long. Cus­tomers are actu­al­ly leav­ing; they do not renew the sub­scrip­tions as we would want. I’ve seen there is a big demand from cus­tomers to mit­i­gate these prob­lems, to have a more seam­less imple­men­ta­tion for hybrid solu­tions — for cloud and on-premis­es — as well as to have less over­head and oper­a­tional effort.

Q. How has SAP worked to answer the chal­lenges spe­cif­ic to ALM?

A. SAP ALM is help­ing. We have the three solu­tions: SAP Cloud ALM, Solu­tion Man­ag­er, and SAP Focused Run. These are three prod­uct lines, inde­pen­dent offer­ings. Not one is the suc­ces­sor of anoth­er. We are not aim­ing at future par­i­ty. I think we have a good port­fo­lio to address the demands to help our cus­tomers … seam­less­ly imple­ment, to get quick time-to-val­ue for our solu­tions, and final­ly, to oper­ate their solu­tion seam­less­ly, on premis­es only, cloud only, or hybrid.

Q. What’s pre­vent­ing more rapid imple­men­ta­tion and time-to-val­ue delivery?

A. One of the key aspects is that the imple­men­ta­tion jour­ney is not guid­ed enough by SAP, with imple­men­ta­tion method­ol­o­gy of part­ners being ful­ly inte­grat­ed in SAP’s ALM. There are always the prob­lems found in test­ing, slow­ing down test­ing efforts. There are prob­lems in data migra­tion and data trans­for­ma­tion, which are big costs. With SAP Cloud ALM, we are tack­ling those pain points, the show­stop­pers, those hur­dles for cus­tomers, to make the sit­u­a­tion better.

Q. Are there oth­er busi­ness chal­lenges that you hear about from customers? 

A. What I always hear is: We want to do the busi­ness trans­for­ma­tion as fast as pos­si­ble. All of our cus­tomers are going through trans­for­ma­tions. They are stan­dard­iz­ing, har­mo­niz­ing, automat­ing their busi­ness­es. As a con­se­quence, they need the tool­ing and the meth­ods when imple­ment­ing the solu­tion, while also steer­ing the part­ner­ships they have to improve control.

Q. Why is the Appli­ca­tion Life­cy­cle Man­age­ment Vir­tu­al Sum­mit a ​“must attend” for ASUG mem­bers and customers?

A. ALM Sum­mit is the once-a-year oppor­tu­ni­ty to learn the lat­est and great­est about all three plat­forms and what we have inno­vat­ed. Our cus­tomers and part­ners ben­e­fit from that. They have access to the experts who basi­cal­ly invent­ed the solu­tions. We pro­vide, even in the vir­tu­al set­ting, net­work­ing oppor­tu­ni­ties and we pro­vide access [for cus­tomers] to ask ques­tions. We make it an inter­ac­tive expe­ri­ence, so they can real­ly derive val­ue from the dif­fer­ent ses­sions. We set the direc­tion and dis­cuss the road map for all three plat­forms. A major top­ic always is: Are there any moves or tran­si­tions, for exam­ple, if a cus­tomer wants to move from Solu­tion Man­ag­er to Cloud ALM. If that is a cus­tomer wish, we explain how that tran­si­tion could work. This is all pre­sent­ed by experts in the area — prod­uct man­agers, devel­op­ers. We bring a lot of exper­tise to the event.

Q. Regard­ing the road map, are there some spe­cif­ic new or dif­fer­ent addi­tions to the road map in 2022 that you’ll be talk­ing about at the Summit?

A. Absolute­ly. In imple­men­ta­tion it is obvi­ous­ly about test­ing. We will talk about test inte­gra­tion and automa­tion and our Tri­cen­tis part­ner­ship. We’ll talk about Cloud ALM deploy­ment man­age­ment and the inte­gra­tion into deploy­ment providers. On the oper­a­tions side, we have a new capa­bil­i­ty called Busi­ness Ser­vice Man­age­ment, which lets cus­tomers com­bine any ser­vice — cloud or on-premis­es ser­vice — and have one view and process around the health of that inte­grat­ed process. 

Q. Is there any­thing you plan to high­light dur­ing the Sum­mit keynote panel?

A. The keynote allows us to dis­cuss the posi­tion­ing of each of the three [ALM] plat­forms and which plat­form is suit­ed for which cus­tomer need. We’ll talk specif­i­cal­ly about RISE with SAP and what is the right offer­ing if you are on that jour­ney. We’ll talk about the tran­si­tion from Solu­tion Man­ag­er to SAP Cloud ALM and how SAP is sup­port­ing that with tool­ing and services. 

Q. Any­thing else you want to direct­ly con­vey to the ASUG mem­ber community?

A. What is of par­tic­u­lar inter­est for us, as an engi­neer­ing and prod­uct man­age­ment team, is obvi­ous­ly cus­tomer input. We are very open and recep­tive to feed­back from our cus­tomers. The Sum­mit also is an oppor­tu­ni­ty to give feed­back to SAP on whether our strat­e­gy is mean­ing­ful, whether there are capa­bil­i­ties miss­ing. So, it’s not just that we talk about our newest inno­va­tions, but also the oth­er way around, a feed­back chan­nel from the cus­tomer to us.

More infor­ma­tion about the Sum­mit and reg­is­tra­tion can be found here.