On-Demand solutions are one of the most exciting trends in IT. There are some clear benefits for on-demand such as quick deployment, no capital expenses and reduced operational responsibilities.
SAP has finally started to catch on to this trend by offering a handful of products on-demand for the large enterprise (I’m not including SMB products like ByDesign):
- Sourcing
- Business Objects BI
- Sales
- Carbon Impact
- Travel (coming soon)
- Career (coming soon)
In my discussions with large enterprises, there has been a consensus to continue investing in on-premise systems, but to consider on-demand for applications that are not critical, not heavily integrated with other systems, and that do not contain sensitive data. That sounds like Solution Manager to me.
 |
Solution Manager 7.1 |
My clients have always had mixed reactions to Solution Manager. Primarily that they are forced to use it. While the business case for the functionality is fundamentally positive, it comes at a high cost. SAP is expensive and complicated to install, configure, and maintain. When customers want to upgrade ECC, first they have to upgrade Solution Manager. When they want to apply a simple patch, first they have to approve this request through Solution Manager. It slows everything down.
Now what if Solution Manager were on-demand?
- Always up-to-date. We would never have to start our ECC upgrade with a SolMan upgrade.
- Reduced infrastructure. The system takes a lot of resources, though processes very few transactions relative to other systems.
- Newest content. Sub-components like the SLD could have the newest content, eliminating steps to constantly update.
- SAP would have access to the system landscape and monitoring components for even simpler troubleshooting.
- Non-critical to business operations.
- Minimal interface bandwidth.
- No sensitive data.
