SOFTWARE LICENSING

Managing SAP Portfolios Changes as Portfolio Becomes More Complex

By Ed Silverstein, TMCnet Contributor

The SAP (News - Alert) portfolio has changed in recent years given its new strategic vision as it heads toward big data and the cloud.

This has led to more complexity. When SAP acquired Business Objects (News - Alert) in 2007, licensing in the SAP portfolio changed as well. Not all licenses were assigned in the Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) application.

Licenses such as SAP Application Business Analyst User, Application Business Information User, Application Business Expert User and Application BI Viewer User were part of license entitlement.

In addition, SAP acquired Human Capital Management solution Success Factors in 2011 – which was using Software as a Service (SaaS (News - Alert))-based license models.

Also acquired was Sybase, a database/data warehouse vendor, in 2010.  This was followed in 2012 with the release of HANA—SAP’s in-memory computing appliance.

“SAP customers now find themselves in the uncomfortable position of trying to manage additional licensing entitlements that rely on complex calculations that consider a combination of hardware and software metrics such as physical memory, allocation limits, allocated memory and used memory,” according to a blog post from Flexera Software. “The evolution of the SAP Portfolio not only requires an understanding of how your employees are using (or in some cases not using) your core SAP ERP system, but also demands an understanding of how cloud based solutions will be integrated and licensed, and requires tracking the hardware configuration and data throughput within your system landscape. The new realities facing SAP customers today require new license management skills on the part of the SAP Basis and BI teams. This is definitely a new era, requiring a whole new approach to SAP Portfolio and Vendor Management.”

In an article from IT Asset Management, Chris Hughes (News - Alert) of Flexera Software, also explained that SAP engines or packages require additional licenses. The metrics used for licensing are unique to each engine. Also, SAP provides hundreds of engines, with a variety of measurements. Hughes suggests that organizations should work with a SAP licensing specialist given the many challenges. Some of these include: duplicate users, misclassified users and unused licenses. They also lead to excessive spending on SAP-named user licenses, according to Flexera Software webinar.

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