In this blog, we’ll explore SAP license management by looking at SAP licensing basics and some common challenges and compliance risks.
About SAP
With nearly 5 decades of experience developing software and applications, SAP is one of the most recognizable names in the technology market, with solutions ranging from customer engagement, manufacturing and supply chain, people engagement, data management, and spend management. To date, SAP has done more than 65 acquisitions in its lifetime, giving it an even broader spectrum of technology and offerings.
The Basics of SAP Licensing
SAP software is modular with a wide scope of offerings that can be licensed and deployed in various ways. Software licensing for SAP depends on its three core tenets:
- The software being licensed (what you’re using)
- How the software is being deployed (on-premise, public cloud, hosted private cloud)
- The licensing model (perpetual, subscription, consumption-based)
Fig 1: SAP Licensing Models
Read the complete SAP Licensing Guide from SAP here.
Common SAP challenges and compliance risks
So far, you may be thinking, “SAP licenses seems pretty straight forward at least on the basic level.” Where do the challenges occur?
Your SAP environment likely consists of multiple instances and modules and possibly thousands of unique user profiles—you’re managing a variety of license types for a number of modules on multiple instances. While there are some tools built in to help manage your SAP environment, they require a lot of time and manual work and have limited capabilities to monitor SAP access and usage on a continuous basis. This presents us with two primary challenges to overcome:
- Lack of overall visibility to all SAP environments and
- Wasted time and resources requiring manual work
With limited visibility of our total SAP environment, license management becomes guesswork and businesses are at risk of running into potential financial, legal, and regulatory issues. Being under-licensed may mean being hit with steep true-up costs and fines. Being over-licensed means business dollars are being wasted on unused software, and without the right tools in place, it can seem impossible to monitor and manage user access. In any of these cases, a lack of clean, accurate data results in a reactive approach to software license management. Let’s dive deeper into a few of the common challenges specific to managing SAP licenses:
- Managing Named User License types
- Managing Indirect Access
- Managing Engine Licenses (Packages)
Managing Named User License Types
One of the more common types of licenses to manage are SAP Named User licenses; these licenses also tend to be where organizations spend the most money with SAP. The licensing complexity comes mainly from two sources.
The first is the contract itself. There typically is no language in an SAP contract stating what it means to be a type of Named User such as Professional or Employee. This can create confusion for an organization in understanding: What Named User licenses do we need to purchase? What roles or transaction functionality can we assign to users with the Named User licenses we’ve purchased? Do we have custom user types specific to our organization? This inevitably leads to over or under purchasing the necessary number of licenses for your organization.
The second layer of complexity comes from user management within SAP. The way in which SAP allows you to create users does not enforce consistency across systems which can result in redundant licensing. For example, if a user has accounts in different systems which have different usernames, an organization could assign multiple Named User licenses to the same individual. This lack of prescribed user management processes is also a source for many quick win optimization scenarios within SAP.
Managing indirect access
In addition to Named User license complexity, SAP’s indirect access policy poses a significant impact on licensing requirements and financial exposure at the time of audit. According to indirect access, any individuals accessing SAP data through third-party software, IoT, or bot must be licensed either under Named User or digital access licensing model, but just discovering indirect access in the SAP environment is a huge undertaking. In an enterprise where automation and integration are at the forefront, there could be numerous third-party applications communicating with different modules of SAP ERP managed under separate teams across the organization.
Managing SAP Engine Licenses
SAP engines (also known as packages) are applications that require additional licensing. The metric used for licensing is unique to each engine and can vary widely. There are several hundred engines available and each engine is licensed by one or more metrics. Some of these metrics have thresholds that must be reached before considering it towards license utilization. SAP systems must be continuously monitored to avoid surprises during annual measurement audits where some engines may be over-utilized and result in penalties. Or some of them are un-utilized engines that are serving as shelf-ware leading to wasted spend.
ServiceNow’s unique approach to SAP
As we’ve seen, SAP’s licensing complexity can present unique challenges for SAM teams. But at its core, SAP license management still requires the same life cycle process automation SAM team’s use for other software publishers. Yes, users are modified within SAP itself, however, customers prefer managing SAP licenses from the same SAM solution where their other software titles are managed. ServiceNow Software Asset Management is the only solution that does not require a separate add-on module specific to SAP, which is installed separately, which comes as an extra charge to the customer. Customers want to manage all their software licenses together in the same place for the same price and automate remediation actions which ServiceNow SAM provides.
Conclusion
To effectively manage software licenses for a vendor with a variety of complex licensing models like SAP, visibility into cost and usage is critical. A lack of visibility of the total SAP environment could result in potential fines, legal action, and an abundance of wasted spend on unmanaged software. IT teams need the capability to manage SAP software in the same place they manage their other software titles, no matter if it is deployed on-premise or the cloud.
SAM and the SAP Publisher Pack
The ServiceNow Software Asset Management SAP Publisher Pack helps monitor and optimize SAP licenses with comprehensive visibility into your SAP license compliance position. The SAP Publisher Pack:
- • Provides complete visibility to license utilization in complex SAP environments
- • Helps reduce risk and costs of Indirect Access
- • Optimizes spend by uncovering duplicate and inactive users
- • Offers optimal license type recommendations based on user role
- • Discovers and analyzes SAP data within ServiceNow
Watch this video to learn more about how ServiceNow SAM can help you control SAP licensing costs.
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