For more insights in SAP Cloud Application Lifecycle Management, don't miss our dedicated hands-on labs and customer sessions at ASUG Tech Connect (Nov. 4-6, in Louisville, Kentucky; register here).
Application lifecycle management (ALM) has long been a favorite framework of IT administrators, bringing together the people, tools, and processes involved in managing software applications from initial concept to eventual retirement.
Within the SAP ecosystem, the growing popularity of ALM is evidenced by the customer community’s embrace of SAP Cloud Application Lifecycle Management, a cloud-based SaaS platform released in May 2020 with just 10 beta customers. SAP Cloud ALM provisioned its 10,000th customer tenant this year in June.
Now, artificial intelligence is reshaping the platform’s role, enabling SAP Cloud ALM to anticipate problems, automate resolutions, and position itself as a critical engine for business transformation across SAP solutions.
ASUG recently caught up with Sören Ruder, Senior Vice President, Global Head of Customer Experience & Solutions at SAP, to discuss the evolution of SAP ALM and SAP’s vision for an autonomous ALM that can proactively identify, resolve, and enact solutions.
In conversation, Ruder expanded on insights he first shared at the SAP ALM Summit APAC 2025, held at SAP Labs India in Bengaluru, regarding AI integration and SAP Cloud ALM’s journey to become the central control tower for implementation, operations, and service delivery. SAP Cloud ALM will also be a major focus at ASUG Tech Connect 2025.
Cloud ALM steps up
As SAP prepares to retire SAP Solution Manager (SolMan), its legacy solution for on-premises systems, the company recommends that new cloud projects use SAP Cloud ALM, a system specifically designed for cloud and hybrid environments. The company is actively providing migration support to help SolMan customers shift to Cloud ALM, according to Ruder.
AI is now a core component and key differentiator of Cloud ALM, he added. While the product is still relatively new, Ruder said customer feedback over the past couple of years indicated that feature gaps still existed. However, he notes that SAP has made significant progress, and by the end of year, he expects to have closed most of those gaps. The long-term goal, according to Ruder, is an autonomous ALM capable of identifying issues, resolving them and implementing fixes with minimal human intervention.
AI is everywhere
AI is accelerating ALM’s evolution from basic maintenance to a strategic, value-generating technology — a progression that Ruder notes is turning SAP Cloud ALM into a business transformation tool that can reduce manual processes.
SAP is setting its sights on a bold future for Cloud ALM. According to Ruder, engineering a more autonomous solution involves three incremental steps: using AI to pinpoint and analyze issues more quickly and accurately, generating AI-driven recommendations for resolution; and ultimately deploying automated agents to execute fixes.
Currently, customers can use AI in Cloud ALM for synthetic user monitoring and predictive analytics to identify anomalies and metrics that exceed normal thresholds. Soon, AI will enable automated problem-solving by tapping into SAP’s massive data lake of service and support data to discover intelligent analysis and provide step-by-step resolution guidance based on historical support data.
By year’s end, SAP will enable autonomous implementation using AI agents, cutting what used to take hours and days of effort to just a few clicks, according to Ruder. These agents will also be able to automatically create test cases and, by processing Microsoft Teams meeting transcripts from workshops, generate detailed requirements.
“AI is literally everywhere, and it’s not only a vision,” said Ruder. “We already have a lot of AI live in our systems, and we are moving more to an autonomous world in ALM. This is where we have already started to develop and deliver the resolution piece. Because for a customer, it’s nice to know there is a problem, but you want to solve it. It’s just not enough to tell you that something’s wrong.”
Beyond setting customers up for autonomous ALM, Cloud ALM also is an essential requirement for achieving and maintaining a clean core in accordance with SAP best practices. According to Ruder, Cloud ALM covers all the dimensions that clean core requires, including custom code information and data point management. Customers can load the RISE with SAP methodology directly into Cloud ALM and use it to better understand their implementations in the hybrid world.
"You will not get to a clean core without Cloud ALM,” he said. “I think that’s the basic statement everyone needs to understand."
Beyond SAP solutions
Because most customers have heterogenous IT landscapes, SAP Cloud ALM is system-agonistic and designed to work with both SAP and non-SAP tools. Integration extends Cloud ALM’s AI-powered capabilities through to partner solutions. Tricentis’ SAP Cloud ALM integration, for example, exists as a joint offering that integrates Tricentis’ test automation capabilities into Cloud ALM so shared customers can manage, orchestrate, execute, and report on automated tests directly within the Cloud ALM environment, covering both SAP and non-SAP applications.
SAP has made significant acquisitions in Business Transformation Management (BTM), including Signavio for process information, LeanIX for enterprise architecture, and WalkMe for user adoption. When combined with Cloud ALM, these acquisitions form a business-transformation toolchain that can strengthen AI capabilities across customers’ integrated ecosystems.
“It has to feel, for customers, like one solution,” said Ruder, adding that SAP has established a combined product council to ensure this unified experience.
Raising awareness to drive implementation
Ruder additionally discussed Cloud ALM’s maturity and pointed to its dramatic growth; the solution is expected to reach 16,000 customers by the end of this year.
One customer journey that speaks to the potential of Cloud ALM has been that of Panasonic North America, Ruder explained. Operating in a hybrid environment, the company runs its SAP S/4HANA installation on-premises while leveraging public cloud solutions for custom applications built on SAP Business Technology Platform, he added.
Panasonic is using SAP Cloud ALM and OpenTelemetry to gain deep visibility into custom-built apps on SAP Business Technology Platform for the Cloud Foundry environment. Ruder explained that the company’s adoption underscores Cloud ALM’s readiness to support large-scale enterprises with complex hybrid setups—a significant milestone in its maturation as a comprehensive lifecycle management solution.
Ruder is adamant that the time is now for customers to migrate, and he ticked off numerous reasons for doing so: “We have developed a cloud-native product. We do daily deployments. We ship new features every two weeks, and it's way easier to set up.”
He also emphasized that certain AI functionalities are only available in SAP Cloud ALM. “It’s just such an efficiency booster that you would miss out if you're not moving now,” said Ruder. “There’s no need to wait.”
For more insights in SAP Cloud Application Lifecycle Management, don't miss our dedicated hands-on labs and customer sessions at ASUG Tech Connect (Nov. 4-6, in Louisville, Kentucky; register here).