Archive for the 'Application Lifecycle Management' Category

SAP optimization harbors great potential for lowering costs over the long term. Implementing and operating SAP applications ends up being more expensive than necessary in most cases. Interests within the SAP community ensure that the operating costs for SAP remain high. Meanwhile, many SAP customers have lost a general overview of their SAP systems, rendering them dependent on SAP itself or a consulting firm specializing in SAP. Architecture errors often require systems to be more complex than necessary, and as a result, overly expensive to operate. Licensing and operating costs sometimes accumulate as well – for systems that companies often only use in part or not at all. SAP optimization harbors great potential for lowering costs over the long term.

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Experience shows that implementing and operating SAP applications typically costs 10-30% more than it should. SAP cleverly positions new systems on a regular basis that offer questionable benefits to customers within the overall context, and do not really contribute to an SAP optimization. Examples include Accelerated SAP (ASAP), SAP Netweaver and of course the Run SAP initiative with SAP Solution Manager.

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For over 15 years, I worked on the topic of SAP change and configuration management. Time and again I encounter SAP consolidation projects from SAP R/3 to SAP R/3. The motivation for such projects is familiar to everyone – reduce costs for SAP operations. Unfortunately, we have seen that SAP has scarcely learned from experience. Already after going live with the first corporate subsidiary, the company is facing a dilemma of whether to go live with additional corporate subsidiaries and operate the first live launch as a competitor.

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Based upon our experiences with projects using various PPM tools, we took the liberty of comparing two project portfolio management heavyweights, namely CA Clarity PPM v12 and HP PPM Center 7.5.

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HP Service Manager is used to administer and process tickets within the framework of IT Service Management. The Service Manager adheres to ITIL V3. Various modules are used, such as incident, problem, change, etc. With the ESS (Employee Self Service) Web control surface, end users can issue their own interaction tickets, which a support technician can then use to open an incident. If no solution is found, the  Service Desk can transfer incidents and interaction tickets as well as track problems and changes.

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The most recent Forrester Wave (Q3 2008) examined the six biggest developers of functional testing solutions. Based on the current offer and the strategy regarding the direction the corresponding solution is to take, HP was ranked number one and IBM came in second. It’s time to take a closer look at the current flagship products and compare them against each other.

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Security is especially important in online applications, yet far too little attention is paid to it. Perform a quick risk assessment just prior to implementation, jerry-rig a plug for the biggest holes, and you’ll have the software up and running in no time. Then a few days later, the first bytes of customer data are stolen. Does it have to happen this way?

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The new Version 10 of the HP Quality Center (QC) is now available. Yet what are the actual advantages of the new QC compared to its predecessor from a Test Manager’s perspective?

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The new concept of the Enhancement Packages (EhPs) from SAP is ingenious from a technical perspective. It’s actually too bad that SAP, the supplier par excellence for business software, has taken so long to create this software logistics concept. Based on the time and effort they’ve put in, any SAP CIO can tell you what this gap in the framework has cost customers. Yet it’s not quite as cut and dried as suggested in the Inside IT article entitled “No More Tedious Upgrades” dated February 4, 2009. The way Roche’s CIO Jennifer Allerton is quoted, one might be led to believe that specialists are no longer need for upgrades. Allerton explained to the Wall Street Journal that Roche had completed four complete upgrades in the last year, which required a team of 15 specialists. She believed that the new Business Suite would enable the company to avoid having to carry out upgrades. And this is a deadly fallacy.

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