Software engineers have been using the expression application lifecycle management (ALM) for at least a couple of decades. Its recent popularity, however, relates to the rise of cloud services.
Application lifecycle management has always been regarded as a control mechanism designed to look after aspects of the “life” of the application itself. It monitors everything from the requirements, to the architecture, programming, changes, updates, and integrations, for all future versions on an ongoing basis.
As high-level as this summary might be, it highlights one important word: changes.
The Constant Beat of Changes
As we now work with cloud-connected, service-centric applications and data channels, change becomes our only constant. If we agree with this proposition, then it becomes clear why we all need to prepare for a lifecycle management process that may not be the same tomorrow as it is today.
SAP is keenly aware of the complexity within our tech landscapes and how the cloud can amplify this. So it has been building bridges for customers through complimentary service and support tools to help its customers embrace application changes as they come.
SAP Solution Manager is one such tool that helps customers drive their applications through a lifecycle so they can proactively address improvement options. These improvements could be user functionality tweaks of varying degrees. Others will be lower-level changes to the application’s back-end architecture or code that help streamline business processes and reduce risk. SAP Solution Manager is the cousin to the recently announced SAP Cloud Application Lifecycle Management tool, designed to help SAP customers manage their cloud implementations in parallel.
A Sound Equalizer Across Your Enterprise
You can think of SAP Solution Manager as a kind of equalizer that helps tune, tweak, and amplify (or turn down and mute) all the internal components of the applications across an enterprise. The SAP Solution Manager for SAP S/4HANA manual actually features the slider knobs and dials of a sound mixing board on its cover.
According to SAP application lifecycle management VPs Marc O. Schäfer and Matthias Melich, SAP Solution Manager 7.2 was explicitly designed to best support SAP S/4HANA. It’s the first release that connects with the SAP HANA database.
Everybody on the Dance Floor Now
Schäfer and Melich call SAP Solution Manager a “central support and system management suite.” The technology itself will also support and manage non-SAP applications for those customers who choose to use it.
“SAP Solution Manager is intended to reduce and centralize the management of [all deployed] systems, as well as end-to-end business processes. It covers the complete application lifecycle of SAP’s customer solutions running on-premise, hybrid, or in the cloud,” Schäfer and Melich noted.
Harmonizing IT and the Business
According to SAP, this technology helps customers document business processes during an application lifecycle. This makes the platform an important business platform as well as an IT platform.
SAP Solution Manager 7.2 core functions include:
- Project management
- Process management
- Test suite
- Change control management
- IT Service Management (ITSM)
- Application operations
- Business process operations
- Landscape management
- Data volume management
- Custom code management
Since the release of this product, SAP periodically issues what it calls Support Package Stacks to enhance its ability to adhere to changing areas of data compliance and provide certain new functions.
Spinning SAP SolMan into Action
So how does it work? SAP has helped develop best practices across more than 500 successful customer implementations. The results of these implementations (appropriately made anonymous and obscure) are then packaged and added to preprogrammed add-ons and IT processes to provide the foundation for SAP Solution Manager.
SAP’s own description of this technology notes: “SAP Solution Manager addresses your entire IT environment. Based on the SAP Enterprise Support contract, it includes a comprehensive set of processes, tools, services, and an organizational model to manage SAP and non-SAP solutions throughout the complete application lifecycle.”
A Responsibility for Orchestration
The move to the cloud and connected web services demands that we also devote ourselves to end-to-end orchestration for our applications. Every DJ needs a good sound tech and a sound mixing board. Who’s ready to fill those right-hand roles in your organization?
And this orchestration leads back to the topic of change. Constant change could turn your organization upside down if you don’t put a team in charge of controlling and managing that change. And that team will need robust monitoring and alerting tools, especially if we expect to re-engineer already live cloud applications. These control factors are the DNA that shapes SAP Solution Manager.
DJ, Play Our Favorite Song
Diligent use of application lifecycle management can, in theory, create a more harmonious connection between the business function and IT operations and development. Don’t expect sweet music tomorrow, but do embrace ALM if you want your applications, enterprise architecture, and cloud infrastructure to live a long, happy, and harmonious life.
Watch this recorded webcast for an overview of SAP Solution Manager. ASUG also hosts regular events and roadshows covering SAP Solution Manager and other application lifecycle topics.