If you are using SAP Solution Manager to maintain your SAP software environment, here’s some excellent news for you and your team.

Last week, SAP launched focused solutions for SAP Solution Manager, a new extension concept for SAP Solution Manager, with the idea of helping our customers meet their particular innovation needs on an individual basis, without the need for homegrown software or customized solutions.

Let me share a little background. What’s happened over time is that, as SAP Solution Manager has evolved, it’s become a stable and widely used platform for managing SAP software landscapes. But customers often have specific and individual needs. If SAP were to make changes to the core product to support these customers, or otherwise introduce innovations, we run the risk of the “long tail”: overly complex software with functionality that’s mostly irrelevant for everyone else. The alternative is for customers to develop custom code on top of SAP Solution Manager, which can be expensive and time-consuming, and doesn’t give them the kind of agility they need.

Now with focused solutions, you can take advantage of a product with a reference process, and with tools and training delivered. SAP delivers standard upgrades, so you license the focused solution once, and we intend to keep it running on future releases. And integration is straightforward because SAP delivers focused solutions based on the proven SAP Solution Manager standard.

This is something I have hoped to offer our customers for a long time. We can do it now thanks to SAPStore.com. If you’re not familiar with SAP Store, it’s an online store that the SAP Digital business unit launched last year to provide various offerings with a simple click-through process that doesn’t require technical assistance or human intervention. The store is focused on digitally native offerings – both on-premise and in the cloud – which can be purchased digitally, with a credit card or PayPal, in a simple click through process, and used immediately (many without requiring any implementation services). It’s a great way for individual customers within enterprises to safely and securely try out offerings from SAP, for example, or for entrepreneurs and small businesses to take advantage of enterprise-class software. All customers can buy focused solutions now on SAPStore.com. Partners can also buy focused solutions on behalf of customers and offer their own value-added services using our focused solutions.

Currently, there are two focused solutions available on SAPStore.com. Focused Build for SAP Solution Manager provides an integrated methodology to manage software development for large projects that have specific requirements. Focused Insights enables top-level, strategic, KPI-driven management with user access to metrics in dashboard form, like service level, application performance or IT scorecard.

The Focused Build approach uses agile software-engineering methods, with progress measured in terms of working functions or products. Tasks are broken down into small increments with short timeframes, known as “sprints.” Documentation is streamlined and pragmatic, which means that the project team does not need to understand the details of every business requirement. Since the methodology is ready-to-run and preconfigured, reporting is automated. Project teams have full visibility into solution-readiness at all times.

Focused Insights delivers the most relevant and valuable information to the right people in real time. While it provides full transparency of information stored inside SAP Solution Manager, it also takes into account the best practices and experience gained during many customer projects, offering a set of prepackaged dashboards personalized to your needs.

These focused solutions are available for purchase for all customers. Please note that customers using SAP MaxAttention get their licenses with a dedicated service, and do not have to purchase them at SAPStore.com. And there is no need for all your SAP Solution Manager users to have access to it; only active project members who actually work with the solution should be licensed. The idea is to be simple, lightweight, user-based and affordable – the cost to license each focused solution is only €250 per user for a year.

We think that with these focused solutions, we are now offering the perfect SAP Solution Manager offering to run your transformational engagements. The response from the first adopters has been very positive. We hope you will try them out and let us know what you think.

Focused solutions – standard software tailored to you.

Please let us know what you think about this new approach. We look forward to your comments.

Marc O. Schäfer is director of Product Management for SAP Solution Manager

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