Most large enterprises elect a hybrid approach to SAP operations, but this is a more recent trend. And, as SAP operations professionals, we are still learning about the impacts of this choice and approach, even though it’s often the most sensible and pragmatic.
Years ago, everything ran on-premises. But today it’s a mixed architecture of SAP running on-premises, landscapes leveraging hyperscaler platforms, and for customers migrating to Cloud ERP, an even more complicated mix including cloud services like BTP in addition to decades of legacy.
The path to “now” wasn’t a vision of the current state as a destination. For most large enterprises, “now” is the outcome of a series of pragmatic decisions, based on the best available information and practices at the time. And today, those systems still run, support the business and continue to deliver value. Evidence the choices made were reasonable ones.
But for SAP customers, an additional complexity appeared: The end mainstream maintenance for Solution Manager, Landscape Management, and the transition to Cloud ALM. So, in addition to managing continuing core ERP operations and Cloud ERP migrations plans concurrently, customers must also manage the end mainstream maintenance of the management software running everyday tasks like monitoring, patching and change management.
Most large enterprise SAP customers are electing an incremental approach to ERP modernization and transformation. Solution Manager comes to the end of regular support in 2027, and Cloud ALM, while clearly the future of SAP’s ALM strategy, isn’t designed around managing legacy systems.
However, large SAP customers need centralized management, so running multiple tools, in addition to the cost and complexity, fails to address a core need. There are dozens of landscapes, hundreds of hostnames, and a vast list of needs from security management to upgrades to monitoring and daily change deliveries that still require traceability, compliant operations supporting clean audits. And all of that across a mixed lot of architectures with unique requirements across each platform.
That means mapping the maze to create a single view across the entire SAP estate isn’t easy.
Driving by Dashboard
A single view across all SAP operations – anywhere SAP runs – remains the gold standard. Such a view should incorporate regular systems checks for things like configuration drift or non-compliant user and role access to systems. It should also summarize monitoring metrics – often measured in the thousands of unique values across a complex estate. And it should report on security topics including patching and automation keeping SAP running safe and securely.
Avantra AIR does just that.
Avantra AIR constantly monitors SAP landscapes to reveal exactly what needs attention, cutting through the daily noise and eliminating alert fatigue, automatically suppressing redundant alert noise.
Get visibility into the most urgent health and performance risks across any SAP estate, anywhere it runs, and at any point in the transformation journey. Prioritized tasks are surfaced automatically based on system criticality, business impact, and real-time context.
Avantra AIR not only monitors and surfaces the most important SAP operations information automatically, it transitions with you, supporting SAP throughout the journey from today’s on-premises ECC to tomorrow’s Cloud ERP – and at all steps on the way.
Critical events in your landscape are constantly analyzed and prioritized so you know where to focus. Avantra AIR provides single-click root cause analysis with detailed explanations and text to document each event. And, a new management interface makes events easy to identify, resolve and reschedule to the right priority after remediation.
The end of mainstream maintenance
Mainstream support for Solution Manager ends in 2027, and many customers have already supplemented core Solution Manager functionality with other solutions.
Then in mid-2024, SAP announced the discontinuation of SAP Landscape Management as well, aligning the discontinuation of Landscape Management with the end mainstream maintenance for Solution Manager and ECC. SAP Landscape Management Cloud was terminated immediately. SAP’s own position was clear: once
ERP moves to the cloud, Basis-level landscape orchestration becomes SAP’s job as the cloud vendor, so the need for something like Landscape Management is eliminated.
For Cloud ERP Public customers, that logic holds. Public cloud customers don’t provision landscapes, orchestrate backups and don’t independently manage servers. But that’s the minority case for large enterprise customers. Combined, on-premises and Cloud ERP Private (RISE) accounts for roughly three-quarters of SAP production landscapes today, and those customers still do the work of regular Basis tasks and SAP operations. Provisioning project systems, system refreshes, kernel patches, certificate rotation, configuration drift checks, HotNews impact analysis — none of it disappears.
So when Solution Manager and Landscape Management see their respective end of mainstream support dates, large enterprises are left with a real automation vacuum right in the middle of their transition, not a clean handoff: observability across hybrid estates, automated system refresh, kernel and patch orchestration, HotNews correlation against the support backbone, certificate and configuration drift management, and a single pane across ECC, S/4HANA, RISE and BTP.
All critical SAP operations tasks, and all remain so for legacy landscapes and even Cloud ERP Private customers who don’t purchase optional Cloud Application Services (CAS) packages with their RISE contracts.
Cloud ALM integration
Cloud ALM is the SAP solution for lifecycle management moving forward. SAP’s transition from Solution Manager to Cloud ALM is clearly stated and well documented. So, it begs the question “how do Solution Manager and Cloud ALM compare?”
It may surprise many to learn that broadly, the two solutions don’t compare much at all. Solution Manager is a legacy ALM solution for on-premises ECC and S/4HANA implementations. Cloud ALM is the next generation ALM solution from SAP, specifically designed for cloud-first, cloud-centric customers.
Beneath this set of statements is an architectural and fundamental difference between the intended purpose of both solutions, and those differences are systemic across the product design, user interface and capabilities. Put simply, Solution Manager was designed for on-premises implementations, and Cloud ALM takes a Cloud ERP centric view of the requirements and needs for managing SAP.
For large enterprise customers, this has two acute impacts; first, Cloud ALM will be part of the final solution of running and managing SAP as Cloud ERP landscapes enter production use; and second, Cloud ALM manages ECC no better than Solution Manager address Cloud ERP, so a transition technology is required.
Avantra design fills this gap perfectly, providing comprehensive capabilities to Cloud and existing on-premises ERP from a single solution, providing a larger set of monitoring, automation and security operations capabilities than either individual solution, and with full support for any SAP landscape.
Avantra integrates with Cloud ALM directly, surfacing monitoring and more in a single view across the ERP estate, regardless of where it runs today or tomorrow. This means Avantra capabilities that complement Cloud ERP – checks, automation, root cause analysis and more – work across on-premises and Cloud ERP in partnership, providing the unified view required by SAP operations in transition.
And, if project complexity or unexpected events delay project schedules, Avantra will manage the transition, keeping the lights on and business running, even as SAP projects change to meet new requirements.
Bring it home
The transition to Cloud ERP is a major project for most large enterprises. The goal of modernizing aging software and architecture while getting out of the datacenter operations business makes a lot of sense for many firms. But few – if any – will do it wholesale in a single step and cutover from legacy systems.
So here we are with hybrid, and for a while, too. If this sounds like your ERP transition, Avantra is here to help with the tools you need to make the migration work without major business interruption in ERP systems or the underlying management technology you depend on to ensure operations run smoothly.
Reach out to your local Avantra expert and set up a discussion and demo – we would be happy to show you how Avantra has made hybrid work in dozens of firms already, and why it’s the best solution for managing complex SAP operations.