At the time of contract negotiation, SAP typically urges its customers to acquire high-priced Professional licenses for 80% of their users and other license types for the remaining 20%. However, most organizations do not require nearly this high of a percentage of Professional licenses. Consequently, these customers end up wasting lots of money over-licensing just to ensure compliance with their SAP agreements.
SAP licenses tend to be very expensive and determining the best license type for each user can be impossible to complete manually. What can SAP customers do to resolve this challenge?
SAP users need to be able to automate license compliance and optimization for SAP applications. Eracent’s Continuous License Reconciliation (CLR) for SAP® Applications™ offers an automated method to ensure compliance for any SAP application, and helps customers realize tremendous cost savings through optimization analysis and license type recommendations based on actual usage details.
The base module, CLR for SAP Applications (Base) provides a broad set of details around your organization’s SAP licenses that includes discovered installations, contracts and agreements with terms, conditions and renewal dates, purchase transactions, license allocations to devices and users, and financial data. The base module generates license position reports for SAP applications that use common, non-complex models such as per user, per server and per device.
The advanced module, CLR for SAP Applications (Advanced), provides a powerful, automated solution for optimizing SAP licensing based on ensuring that each user has the license type that best matches their actual use of SAP system functionality. This module addresses three critical aspects of SAP licensing: User, Indirect Access and SAP Software Engine. It examines user licensing from two levels. The first level compares current licensing – actual installations and assignments – with data from SAP purchase agreements and contracts. Current licensing reflects what SAP would see if they did an audit right now, using data in the user records in SAP.
The second level of calculations, which can result in huge savings on SAP licensing, is License Optimization, which calculates and recommends the ideal license type for each user. These recommendations are based on each user’s actual usage and behavior when utilizing and interacting with your SAP system. If SAP questions any of the optimized data provided in reports, you will be able to produce all of the justification as to why licenses were classified in a certain way.
Another important feature, SAP Engines Reporting, compares contractual to current, actual measurements of SAP Engine usage. The reports help you maintain license compliance around SAP Engines, provide data for advance planning, and enable alerts as full utilization approaches.
There has been a big buzz in the industry around SAP Indirect Access licensing. The system uses various usage profiles, heuristics and analysis of different connections to identify potential Indirect Access “users.”
Not only can you manage Indirect Access from systems you’re aware of, but if a new Indirect Access system is added and connects to SAP for its operations, then the CLR module will discover this.
If your organization uses SAP, you no longer need to worry about managing your licenses, compliance, optimization and costs if you have CLR for SAP Applications!
For more details, please visit our CLR for SAP® Applications™ page or download our data sheet.
– by William Choppa
William Choppa is the President of Eracent. He has almost twenty years’ experience helping clients meet their ITAM and SAM challenges with his knowledge of technical solutions and business process best practices.
