I was fortunate to attend various presentations on the topic of SAP’s solution management at SAP TechEd 2008 Berlin. My expectations regarding SAP solution management would be that SAP could finally take on the task of solution management for specific customer implementation scenarios, and that it would do so in a comprehensive manner. Sadly, this has not yet been achieved.
Even after visiting the solution management presentations I was disappointed to find that even though the SAP Solution Manager does fulfill the requirements to manage a standard SAP system, key functions pertaining to the solution management of specific SAP customer implementations are missing. Apparently the Solution Manager remains primarily a gateway to the customer’s infrastructure.
SAP’s marketing, however, cleverly packages the Solution Manager as a comprehensive lifecycle management solution for specific SAP customer environments, even though basic requirements for bona-fide solution management using SolMan—such as customization version control or dependency management among individual software components—are nonexistent.
Summary: It is somewhat disillusioning that SAP still hasn’t directed the SAP lifecycle management toward solution management for its thousands of different customer implementations. Despite the potential benefits for all SAP customers, the lifecycle management solution bearing the wonderful name of Solution Manager is still mainly a software logistics-specific bridgehead for SAP standard software.
Note: beteo has implemented comprehensive SAP solution management for actual customer implementations based on standard processes and standard software.
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