Explore the Cloud Momentum and see how SAP Cloud ALM supports your journey to the cloud. Learn how your transition from SAP Solution Manager to SAP Cloud ALM could run and how our partners ecosystem will support it.
Discover the transformation suite approach with SAP Signavio and SAP Cloud ALM as its core elements and listen to a transition story. Energize your ALM transformation by using SAP Cloud ALM at its best.
Learn more: https://sap.to/6052ua5Tp
Good morning, how are you? A warm welcome to ALM Summit 2023 in the city of Mannheim. It’s actually the city of birth of myself. And finally, this is a very special location for me, because in previous years this has been actually a dancing school.
I have practiced in a milonga with my wife at this very spot in this very room. And actually at this spot here where I’m currently standing was the bar of that milonga. So, while in previous years, we were dancing on the bar only by Thursday evening, we have advanced,
Or should I say transformed, and we are already dancing on the bar at the beginning in the opening of the keynote. Isn’t that great? Wow! So, my talk today will be picking up on Stefan’s notion of transformation. And I will start actually with the larger picture of transformation,
Which is business transformation, and then move into the solution transformation, which we do with application lifecycle management, obviously also covering the operations part of the application lifecycle, and then move back to that idea or approach of a transformation suite and bring you back to the larger picture.
So, what are the drivers for customers to transform business? It’s actually three. All our customers are threatened in their ecosystem, need to be faster in innovating with new business models, they need to get into agile enterprises. The second big topic is the resistance, the resilience of the supply chain,
Making you more resilient when it comes to the supply chain delivery. And then finally, all customers are forced to have environmental reporting, at least the large customers, by January 1st, 26, and with that, sustainability becomes a big driver of transformation. So, if these are the three drivers of transformation, and by the way,
All our solutions are actually supporting these aspects big time, what are the ingredients that you need to transform successfully? So, what are the capabilities that you need? And here I would say it’s four. One is you start with basically a strategy.
Perhaps McKinsey or like comes in and you make ideas of what are the capabilities of the future that I need for my new business models. Second is then, okay, I need also to understand how these capabilities are coming together in an operational model and that brings me to a business process.
So I need to transform my processes. Finally, I can only standardize and harmonize a process with a software solution, doesn’t work with Excel. So I need a software solution that also needs to be transformed. And what we should never forget is that, I think Peter Ducker once said it, culture
Eats strategy for breakfast. So if the people are not with you and you are not enabling your people, that they understand how they participate in the process and how they use the software, you will fail in the transformation. So these are the four aspects that we need to transform successfully.
Now for the next few minutes I will cover the solutions part of it and then I will come back to the larger picture. Important is when we talk about solution in ALM and then also in the transformation suite, we always mean the heterogeneous solution
Of the customer, which is SAP and unfortunately also some non-SAP. And it’s admittedly also not only cloud, but also on-premise. Cloud ALM runs in the cloud, it’s a SaaS solution, public cloud, but it supports SAP and non-SAP and cloud and on-premise. So does the whole transformation suite.
When Stefan did before the definition of application life cycle, he said it’s about transforming. So that’s obviously one big aspect. The other aspect of ALM is obviously managing continuous improvement and business continuity. So the operations part of cloud ALM.
And I don’t need to tell you these phases you all consult that day by day. What I would like to highlight is the Cloud ALM capabilities around that are a little bit perhaps in the second row and that you don’t see so much. First, the service and support collaboration.
Let me start with service collaboration. Very silently, we have moved out all the service delivery out of Solution Manager into our cloud. And actually I can tell you that we have an internal cloud ALM tenant. We call it the cross-customer ALM tenant.
And there are over 3,000 service engineers from our customer success teams are delivering services, the enterprise support services, preferred success, the marks attention services for you. And the results of those are shared in the SAP Cloud LM tenant of the customer. So we have really separated the delivery concern, mainly our duty,
With sharing the results in your talent. So that’s the service collaboration. All live, all existing today. Actually for service delivery, when it comes to the real delivery, you don’t need a solution manager anymore. And the second aspect is support collaboration. Solution Manager was very famous for providing a solution
To support the customer with IT service management, and then also integrating into the support backbone. And actually, we have announced that in Cloud ALM, we will not have an IT service management solution anymore. But I am very happy that partners have actually taken that space.
And here we are not talking only about very high-end cloud solutions for super-large customers, but also specific solutions for SAP customers. One is out there already on the store. It was the winner of the Amazon in India, a solution called TikiTalk.
It costs, I think, 6,000 euros per year as an ITSM solution specifically for SAP support. And we will see more also in the Amazon that are going in this space. Stay tuned on that. So that’s the ITSM part, but there is also the support
Collaboration part in terms of integration into the support backbone. So we have actually revealed our API strategy for integrating into our support backbone. Solution Manager always had such capabilities, and going forward this will be also made available throughout 2024. We will talk about that in more detail.
And specifically today already, you can access from Cloud ALM via an API all the information about the availability of our solutions from Cloud Health and Reliability and mix it up into your ITSM and ITOM solution that you might have out there. This API already is available in Cloud ALM. So that’s support collaboration.
And then we have the data lake for service and support, already mentioned, operated by VLAN’s team. And here, we are actually having a cross-customer analytics layer powered by AI that allows us to understand the wisdom of the crowd and play recommendations back into your customer tenant.
I’ll talk about AI and ALM a little bit more in a minute. So, where do we stand with the cloud ALM rollout? We have in the meanwhile, and I just got the most current figure from Wilhelm, 4,165 customer tenants live, and we are adding 8 a day, but only on Friday.
For the other four days, we are adding actually ten a day. Isn’t that momentum? So, it took us 19 months for the first 1000 customers, 7 months for the next 1000 customers, and only 4 months for the third 1000 customers. We have a total of 2,000 customers. That’s our momentum. Pretty impressive.
And when I look at all the UIs, I can easily even show the UIs. When Matthias Meilisch was on stage, he never showed a demo because the solution manager was kind of ugly sometimes. This is just a nice user experience. What are the typical entry points into Cloud ALM?
What are adoption use cases where we actually actually really see customers adopting Cloud ALM. First of all, it’s managing your end-to-end implementation project. We started there heavily with S4HANA public cloud. In the meanwhile, we see more and more private cloud implementations, also done with Cloud ALM, and then obviously with our content
For Ariba, so sex sectors, Fieldglass. Also, those projects are coming more and more. So, while this manages the complete requirements to deploy process, we have also support specifically for the conversion of Cloud ALM. Again, very silently, we moved the readiness check for SAP S4HANA into Cloud ALM, and they are currently integrating all
The follow-up management for the simplification items and for the custom code into Cloud ALM, so that you can use Cloud ALM. This is a one-stop-shop for managing a conversion project to S4HANA. Specifically for data migration, we are also in the process of adding data
Migration capability for selective data transfer from ECC to S4. Finally, as a third use case that occurs quite often, is the automated regression testing specifically for cloud releases. Not everyone is as cloud-native as we are with daily delivery and bi-weekly feature release. Others are really having still types of releases,
And you need to test them with your specific extensions that you did and this automated regression testing can be supported. How? With actually a launch that we did a couple of weeks ago and this is the integrated Tricentis test automation for SAP integrated with SAP Cloud ALM.
So there’s a cloud version of Tricentis now being available. It’s not the on-prem Tosca anymore. It’s a cloud native product like Cloud ALM, right? There is Solution Manager Cloud ALM, there is Tri-Ascent, there is Tosca On-Prem and Tri-Ascent is Cloud. And we pair up, so to say, equal with equal,
So that integrates into the cloud version. And you can actually request that from within Cloud ALM. We have also seen a lot of requests for that, a couple of hundred call-offs already. And by the way, we are still working on the full reseller version.
There are usage rights restrictions with regards to the Tri-Center’s test automation. And if you have really a lot of load, currently it’s around 2-3% of the TTA customers are beyond the limit. And they will be able to purchase them from SAP TTA for enterprise level in context of our price list.
All right, next adaption use case is synchronized deployments. In context of a clean core strategy, you have S4HANA configuration settings, for example, but then also BTP extensions and you want to synchronize the deployment between those. This is a typical transportation scenario that we know from Solution Manager Charm
And a lot of people are telling me Charm is not available in Cloud ALM. Actually transportation management is already, okay, there are a couple of things like cross-system object lock and retrofit, I know we will do that, you will hear from Michael Cleffer on that.
But basic transportation management is already there and fully integrated in Cloud ALM. And then finally, a big portion of adoption, a big driver for adoption of Cloud ALM is the monitoring use cases. Integration monitoring, monitoring of real users, process monitoring, we are really focusing on this higher level of this monitoring stack.
Big adoption there, a lot of interest and I’m very happy with the results there. By the way, these adoption use cases, as we were asked by the field, how can we explain Cloud ALM better, we have actually really prepared with a fact sheet.
Either of them have a fact sheet with the demos behind them so that we can really focus on a couple of very concrete topics which we can recommend to our customers. And these are the ones I would always go for when I talk to customers about Cloud ALM to start with.
Alright, so if we are so successful and we have so much adoption, right, I mean there’s still a lot of Germans and I already see somewhere at the right end in the back telling me one, two, three, four, five doesn’t work,
So let’s go through these topics and in your opinion don’t work, right, and let’s see what the reality about that is. That is, yeah. So we are switching now mode and right backbencher tells me I need more than one cloud ALM tenant.
I have to admit today we can only be providing one tenant per customer number. If you have more than one customer number under a group, you can obviously also have more as a Volkswagen, but per customer number it’s only one.
And yes, we have accepted that feedback and next year we will actually allow you to request additional Cloud ALM10s under a customer number for the use case you like. It can be non-productive use cases like training, evaluation and demo, development and testing of extensions.
It can also be an extra production tenant because you want to separate for whatever reason, implementation from operation or whatever. So this will be possible. You request an additional tenant and you use the additional tenant as you want. Now, one thing is very important to understand.
And this is that in our view you don’t need the extra 10 to test SAP Standard Cloud ALM. We have a test coverage of 99%. We only release if our pipeline completely goes through. There is no need to test SAP standard. So why would you then still need a development and test tenant?
Well, for configuration that comes up. Today we don’t have so many configuration options in Cloud ALM. And going forward obviously also with all the APIs that we publish, also for the testing of your extensions. Good. On the right side, another guy from the back, what is it, Carl Winter? Is it Carl?
Yeah, it’s Carl. I am regulated, and I don’t need just that additional tenant for testing. I need it on the previous version, so that I can do release regression testing. So that’s the use case, regression testing of extensions against new releases in regulated environments.
Release is a relatively shaky word in Cloud ALM because we are delivering actually every day and every two weeks there is actually a new release in the sense of a new feature set. So how will that solution work? How would we like to support you for that?
Normally you have that production tent which is a standard tent. Then going forward we will allow you to opt-in into a delayed production tenant. That means that your production is on N-1, so to say delayed by two weeks. So while all the other customers are already,
Are still on the most current one, you are just delayed by two weeks. So you are like time shifted back for two weeks. And that allows you, within 14 days, one, four days, to do the regression testing of your custom specific extensions on the most current release level.
Within these 14 days, you need to be through, and you need to have fixed all your code. Because without any doubt, we will update the production tenant, so to say, from n plus one to then the most current level. Absolutely, without any way for you to stop that. We are still public cloud.
That by the way means that you should also use test automation for testing SAP Cloud ALM. Our pipeline is totally automated. We do that daily. If we can do it daily for all SAP, for all of our functionality,
You should be able to do it within 14 days for the little capabilities that you added to Cloud ALM. So that’s our simple view of the world. There is more information on regulated industry support. Support, yeah, so it’s not only that what we do but also a lot of functional stuff
And that will be Explained by Michael Clefine is keynote Okay, so next thing and that’s probably now the second guy from the from the left I need cloud ALM in a data center that is close to me we have extended actually our availability of Cloud ALM from a data center perspective.
Initially, we just supported Germany. In the meanwhile, we are also in the USA, North Virginia, in Sydney, Australia, and in Tokyo, Japan. Today, you can basically select this one of these 40 data centers. Going forward, we’ll also open up a data center in Canada, and then another one,
And that is not yet on the roadmap, that’s on our vision in China, we are currently doing proof of concepts for that. China is a little bit more difficult for us, because it’s daily delivery and it’s a kind of private cloud that has to be operated there.
So it’s not so super simple to do, but we are still committed to find a solution here. And then we have two other aspects of data center availability which go beyond just regional storage of data but also the people dimension comes in.
We have people in the EU that are operating the system respectively, providing support for the system or even in a country cloud somewhere. And that’s actually where UXS comes in and then also sovereign cloud and by the way NS2 for the US is exactly one aspect of such a sovereign cloud
For the US customers. So also that is on our roadmap, we want to support that. We do everything in a step and this is exactly the steps that we would like to take when it comes to getting close to you and also support more country or regulated environments.
Good, so the next one is obviously a big one from the second guy on the left. I want to transition from Solution Manager. How do you support me? Today you have not the migration tools that I need. Yeah, that’s indeed true.
So today what we provide is a transition center for the move to cloud ALM So we have centralized all information Good work from Ben Schneider on that one. We get tons of good feedback for the completeness of the information that you find there.
Second, what we have launched is the readiness check for SAP Cloud ALM. So you can actually scan your Solution Manager, export from there, import it into the readiness check application in our cloud and from there browse through all the simplification items that we have on the movement from Solution
Manager to Cloud ALM, understand what is the new capability, what is a little bit different than before, and we really advise you, I mean you can run that actually already today, right, it’s not a problem for you, with that you can prepare for the move,
And also the readiness check application from Gustavo and Matthias Bigert, they are the experts here, will be shown on the event here. Obviously, we have also tons of implementation services, including services within enterprise support and preferred success that are available to you. So what are the things that we still have to do?
One is the transition methodology to Cloud ALM. So we want to provide you really with a roadmap for the movement from solution manager to cloud ALM similar than the roadmap that you have from ECC to S4. You would even be able to use that roadmap within cloud ALM and then
Do the transition with cloud ALM itself. And we want to provide you tools for selected data transfer for solution documentation and test cases. That will be available with an export and an import, which goes to Excel. That allows you also to massage a little bit the data from your end
Or to merge things. And you need to be at least on the support batch package level 15 to do the export. So that’s the minimum departure point on the cloud ALM side. And then you can basically import that beginning of or mid of 2024 into cloud ALM.
With that, I think we have covered the most important investments in data, specifically documentation and test cases with an automated transfer. So that’s mid of 2024 and I always come back to this statement of use your transition to cloud ALM to rethink and simplify your ALM processes.
Do you still need these complicated workflows? Can you make them simpler? Next guy tells me, again from the left, now second guy, but what about AI? This is traditional good transactional stuff, all fine, but something modern also needs to be AI-infused and before we heard from Stefan
That we are the business AI company, so ALM needs to go AI. And indeed, we will already show in this, and I didn’t bring all our ideas here, but something very concrete that we will also partially demo, actually the top two guides in implementation operation.
Be shown on the event and implementation AI, it’s the generation of solution documentation. We are working with Tresentis on creating automatically from test cases, sorry, from requirements, test cases, so that basically the text comes up, and then also we will have an automated project summary with risk rating for the whole project.
So these things are in the making, they are not theory, these are three use cases that are also using actually LLM technology. In Operations AI there is another LLM use case which is providing you recommendations for alert mitigation.
So these are also texts that are generated for every alert, how to react on it. And then there are two scenarios in operations AI that are more supervised AI mechanisms, which is threshold less alerting and anomaly protection. Threshold less alerting is a topic that I always hear from customers, especially in re-user monitoring.
I cannot always put in the right threshold, can’t the system learn from a good day, and then that is the threshold that I’m using, and exactly these use cases will be shown by Janko during the summit. So, ALM also goes AI, so another move that we have here eliminated.
But still I need more capabilities in Cloud ALM. There is something missing that is not out there. Now, obviously you first look at our roadmap. Janko Michael really maintained very diligently the roadmap for the next four quarters. You see a lot of entries there, what is still to come.
And if that is still not sufficient, we have set up an influence program. We call it SAP Continuous Influence for SAP Cloud ALM. And actually you as a customer or a partner can submit a request and whenever there are more than five votes more than five votes on the request,
We look into the request from your site and the probability is not so bad that if it fits somehow in the strategy that we will also implement that and add it to our daily delivery. So, in contrast to Solution Manager, where this was a little bit more campaign
Based, this is now a continuous process where you can continuously influence our roadmap. And you find here the two QR codes for the request UIs. Good. So I hope that with that, we are clear that Cloud ALM is, in the meanwhile, I would say an adult.
And it’s not just something that you can laugh about. It’s not a doll anymore. It’s a true application lifecycle management environment. And when I would summarize, someone would ask me, should I now use Cloud ALM or Solution Manager? My summary is always the same, use SAP Cloud ALM for operations
If you need it, because you still have a lot of on-prem workload and there is no other partner SAP doing operations for on-prem. Then add Focus Run and use the combination of Cloud ALM and Focus Run. That’s the operation side. For service delivery, you can right away use Cloud ALM.
For implementation, we have to differentiate a little bit. For all cloud implementations, for public cloud, private cloud, up to success sectors, rebar and so on, use Cloud ALM. If you are in a transformation to S4 on-prem and you are a heavy user of so
Many, especially solution documentation and charm, stay with Solution Manager, complete your S400 journey on-prem with Solution Manager and then move over to Cloud ALM. So that is, for me, the only use case why a customer should still use SAP Solution Manager. Good.
I want now to switch a little bit gears and bring you back to the full picture of the transformation suite. So far I’ve covered the solution aspect, now we are going into all the four aspects, strategy, process, solution and people. And I’m going to start with a statement that I accidentally found
In Wirtschaftswoche two weeks ago. I saw a picture of our CEO saying in that article in the Wirtschaftswoche, together with Linax, we want to offer a comprehensive transformation suite to provide holistic support for our customers’ business transformation. So it seems that we are entering a new space as SAP, not just covering BGP
And business apps but also business transformation itself. And we believe that this is a business on its own where possibly we can repeat the success that we had in ERP with integration also in the context of business transformation. There are not so many vendors out there that have an integrated suite.
And we also believe that this transformation suite can have a very positive impact on our BTP and our business apps business. So what is the transformation suite? It’s a solution that covers transformation from strategy to execution. It starts with enterprise architecture management. Basically, a value partner comes in, the value partner does consultancy
On the new capabilities that you would need going forward, and that’s exactly where LinaX comes in. LinaX, to be very clear, is an acquisition that we plan. It’s not yet completed. However, we have today already a very intense go-to-market with them. It’s an endorsed business solution.
This is the solution, currently promoted solution extension within Q4, if everything goes right, and then hopefully we will see the acquisition next year. Capabilities is about the what. What do I need going forward as a customer for my new business? Then comes the process world, where I arrange the capabilities in an
Operating model. How do I do it? And that’s the playground of SAP Signavio. Signavio is a process transformation suite and it covers both analysis and design. Design is, so to say, the drawing part and analytics is the mining and analytics part.
The best process that you have designed needs to be executed finally in a software solution and that’s where Cloud ALM comes in. That’s about the solution transformation, transforming the solution from state A to state B. And then finally, for adding the people, we have enable now and build-in support.
And I will come how these two guys play together. So that’s about people. Alright, so these are the four parts of a transformation suite that we want to integrate better. How does it look like from a flow perspective? With LinearX, you are usually doing capability mapping within a strategy definition.
From there move into a high level architecture and from there move into a roadmap exercise of a transformation journey for your software solution landscape. That takes us then into the process part of Signavio, where we analyze the SIS process with analytics and mining, enhance the best practice processes that
Are also coming in, design a to-be solution, and then goes through the complete application lifecycle that you’re all well aware, build, test, deploy, and run. And then we need to take the people alongside with us, brings us into enable,
And with that we are back into the loop, into a loop of continuous improvement. Let me, before I move on into these different aspects, explain LinaX a little bit more, because that’s a newcomer, and you might not all be aware of that.
Also I have to say that I have seen a lot of large customers being very happy with LinaX and using that as a central angle for the enterprise architecture. So, LinearX, first of all, has a capability called business capability mapping.
And that’s actually where you just describe what do you need as a company going forward to succeed. From there, you can define a project roadmap, an application portfolio with a roadmap that shows you how I move, how my landscape, my capabilities are changing over time with applications.
And if you now think about integration into Cloud ALM, perhaps I go one step backwards here, how nice would it be if that picture of applications, this application portfolio would be automatically fed by Cloud ALM and guess what, by Cloud ALM and guess what, right?
The landscape API that we are already having is already in the making by our LinaX friends and we will show that in the presentation, LinaX together with SAP Cloud ALM. Also here, this is not yet a plant integration, but it would be nice if we
Could also feed our initiatives, our projects into that larger picture of all the transformations that are going on from an enterprise architecture perspective. So another quite interesting integration. And then finally, when we are more moving into solutioning, they are also having capabilities around data flow mapping, data flow pictures.
And how nice would it be if that could integrate into solution documentation and possibly you could even define a constraint that not only a test case needs to be available for a given process but also a data flow diagram.
All that are things that will be discussed with LinaX and the first use case is already in the making. LinaX has a lot of other enterprise architecture diagrams. Another one is interfaces and how interfaces are correlating with each other. Now, what you have to understand is that today LinaX is very
Strong in showing that and all the dependencies, dependencies like an enterprise architecture management tool does, but always with manual entries. I think where we can then help, from the SAP side, is really to mine that, to really automatically detect that and not just rely on someone giving that information.
Linux by the way, when I asked Linux at Sapphire, when I already knew a little bit what we were doing with them, why are you so successful? Why are you so much more successful than an Aries or whatever that is out there for such a long time?
And I got a very surprising answer by them. They are saying, obviously we are completely cloud and we are not an on-prem product, sure, by that. But the second aspect was we have a completely different pricing scheme. while traditionally you are always licensing by user, they are licensing by modeling artifacts.
And with that, the tendency to make it collaborative and that a lot of people in the company contribute to these very IT-specific things is much higher. So it has a very quick focus on collaboration, very similar than SIGNAVU does.
Alright, so obviously why we are having an interest in that is we want to gain transparency about the most important assets of the future. We want to have a complete holistic transformation. The transformation and enterprise architecture was missing in that picture, and with that we want to overall accelerate the adoption of solutions.
Good, coming back to my transformation suite approach picture. Very important is that we really want to make it a suite. And I’m totally aware, right, that today this is not a suite. Today these are, this is LinaX, this is Signavio, this is Cloud ALM,
And in itself they are great, but the integrations are today relatively weak. But we want to make it a suite, we want to have these integrations. We want to make it one methodology, one process, and one integrated toolchain. So, what is one methodology? Okay, we start with a business strategy.
We define the business and solution architecture with Linax and Signavio. It brings us into the prepare phase. From there, we can then do the preparation, the mining, and there are interesting capabilities in SIGNAVIA was added, which is combining the ERP analytics that they have with the mining UI. Mining UI is very flexible.
ERP analytics is so great because it comes out of the box. We need to have, like in Solonis, a lot of hours invested in getting results. So we combine the out-of-the-box behavior with the flexible mining UI, and the Signavio guides call that plug-and-gain. From there, we are then moving into Explorer,
Best practices, fit to standard. You can do that with Cloud ALM if you have Signavio, and the integration would be at some point in place. can also do your fit to standard workshop with your business Insignia directly and then move it into cloud ALM.
I will talk about when comes what in terms of integration still. I’m dreaming a little bit today for a few more minutes and then show you a little bit also the reality. Then managing the Agile implementation project with Cloud ALM, with the Tricentis integration that I have already explained.
From there we then deploy, we deploy technically, but we also enable the people with enable now. From there, we are managing the go-live, the cut-over, and we are operating a solution and we have all the joy of the cloud LM for operation capability in the solution version 1.
From there, from this innovation cycle, we are now moving to the enhanced pace in the old solution manager terminology, and we are doing the same but in a faster cycle of continuous improvement. It takes us to solution version 2 and so on. So that’s in principle the methodology we would like to follow.
Second thing, we want to get to one process. We want to get to one process in a sense that we have one logical process hierarchy, and both SIGnavio and Cloud ALM are attaching their artifacts to this process hierarchy. From the SIGnavio side, it would be things like GSE, risk and controls, people
Enablement, value drivers, data-driven process analytics. From our side, from the ALM side, would be test cases, requirements, changes to the solution and then any description of a solution like the ones that we have, applications, interfaces, executables and with Linux also data flows.
The integration between SAP Cloud ALM and SAP Signal View will happen most probably in two steps. The first step is a synchronization-based solution, where I still have left and right, and there are BPMLs that are synced. This is what you are used to from the solution manager times when it comes
To BPM integration. But our ultimate goal and the second step of integration will be that we are really based on one process hierarchy. So no synchronization anymore, one business process master list in that suite. That’s for me a suite. Integration for me is not just synchronization of data,
It’s really one harmonized data model. And that’s what we are aiming at. It will take time to get there, to be very clear. Next question that we always get, right? You saw also the people aspect and you saw that dream team of Enable Now and Build-in support. How do they play together?
And Enable Now is actually part of our product strategy. All the documentation that we provide is based on Enable Now. Also, the documentation in Cloud ALM is based on Enable Now. You can add your own documentation with Enable Now. You can create guided tours and videos and so on.
So that’s a complete learning suite. It’s really for that use case, hmm, how does it work? So that’s your angle of the mouth. When it’s built in support, it’s a different angle of your mouth. Why doesn’t it work? So built-in support is really about that more reactive aspect.
It’s not just getting started, but it doesn’t work. How can I proceed? And we really made it in the meanwhile, built-in support, that we are supporting 25 solutions. So it’s not just S4HANA public cloud, as a lot of people think, but 25 solutions overall, half integration to build in support.
And then it’s an aggressive roadmap to also add it to success factors and others in build-in support. And these two, from our point of view, are playing very nicely together. And by the way, Stefan mentioned Joule. Joule is just a third one. Because Joule is about executing something in the system.
It would be also nice if you could just tell Cloud ALM via SAP Joule, show me the last project summary and give it to me, for example, or an ERP, I don’t know, execute some sales order for me or show me the latest analytics. This is about execution in the system.
It’s three different use cases, execution in the system, getting trained and getting support. Okay, now comes the most interesting part, the integrated toolchain. And some of my colleagues have warned me not to show that picture because it’s not keynote style and much more detailed. Therefore, I will explain it on an adequate level.
The middle part you already know. Still within the inner ring, as a core capability, you see all our orchestration capabilities that you are probably all aware of in the ALM space, requirements, solution documentation, by the way, newcomer is in the meanwhile there with a roadmap to improve it,
Project and task management, test planning, test planning and another newcomer that we added compared to last year, test execution, defect management, change and release, deployment and then monitoring and alerting. So these are our orchestration capabilities. Now, what we have added around this is a fletora of automation and execution
Tools that really do it, that automate the things in a project or in operations. And what are these automation capabilities that are attached to Cloud ALM, which are integrated with Cloud ALM? It’s custom code mitigation, we have SAP offerings there, but we are also working with third-party vendors to integrate them
In Cloud ALM. Data transformation, we have our own capabilities coming up by end of the year for EC2S4 move, but also we are integrating partners into Cloud ALM currently. We have integration into central business configuration, that’s another aspect of automation, execute something. It’s not configuring something, but just activate it.
For me, it’s an automation that, ultimately, I do if I follow that procedure. Test automation, by default, is automation. And I talked about this already. And we have that in the meanwhile, not just for S4HANA Cloud via the mechanisms that they have out of the box, but also with TTA for SAP
And non-SAP. Transportation management, another interesting part. I said that Cloud TMS, ABAP transportation management system for all versions of S4 can already be executed. And we are also working to also do automation of retrofit and cross-system object lock in that space. And even better, first time ever we didn’t do that
In Solution Manager, we are allowing even third parties to integrate into Cloud ALM in transportation management. So we were approached by companies like Graftrek. So far we always competed in Solution Manager with Charm. Can we integrate our retrofit into Cloud ALM? And honestly, I’m too old of having enemies, I only like friends,
And therefore we said, if it’s not orchestration, if it’s not the core capability in the middle, but if it’s about automation, why not having alternative automation providers? No problem. Integration into automation, these are BTP services, automation of integration setup, and then finally also operation automation.
You have an alert that is thrown, you want to automatically react on it. We have certain BTP services, we’ll explain that later, that can basically do the auto-reaction. And with that, Cloud ALM is not just, so to say, an orchestration capability,
It’s an execution automation network of partners and SAP tools that are coming together. I would say that is pretty powerful. And if we are then able to extend it to the left, it would be even nicer. Now, let me now explain on this picture where we stand in terms of integration.
Solution itself is nice, process in itself is nice, capabilities in itself is nice, but how about the flow between them? I will explain it from the Cloud ALM perspective. We are working on integration into LinaX via the Landscape API to make our landscape transparent to the capabilities and application portfolio in LinaX.
This is not so far out, probably a couple of months. We are working with ENABLE NOW for an integration that is due in roughly four weeks where ENABLE NOW reads out our process library and then shows to the instructional designer where our instructional design learning material is missing.
So we integrated into build and in the next step when our API would be ready, they will also then publish these learning artifacts that were created in the label now in CloudLM right away by AirLink. So this is also relatively close.
Okay, coming back to another request that I always got, and this is can we have a certification on ALM solution transformation, but also on the topic of perhaps even the complete business transformation suite, when it would exist and would not be just an approach. And people are telling me, especially consultants, hmm,
There is an S4 consultant and there is a REBA consultant that you can get certified by SAP, but how can I get certified as a solution transformation consultant or business transformation consultant? And actually, we took that feedback. And first time ever on this event, we will do a solution transformation
Consultant badging, which will be valid for one year. You can do it on Friday. It’s super hard to pass. Tim Steuer was the first one that passed it. There will be even questions from this keynote in that test.
And I was asked to tell that upfront, so I hope that you didn’t sleep all the time, because otherwise it would be hard to test now. Now, this is a badge valid for a year that we do out of this event.
In the next year, we plan to make it an official certification, first of all, together with SAP Learning. So with them there will be learning journeys and it would be an official certification which is then also more valid than more than one year
And also, but that depends now also on the product availability of the transformation suite, make it really a solution transformation certification. So we want to, I mean as we are aiming at a solution transformation suite, we should over time also evolve this thing now born here in Mannheim to complete
Solution transformation consultant and business transformation consultant certification. So that’s our clear goal. The batching that we are doing here on this event is just the first step on Friday, but it will go on and you can basically certify at some point in time yourself for the full batch, for the full suite.
So, with that, I want to give it back to you. So, what are my recommendations, my asks to you? First of all, when you are a solution measure customer, plan the transition to Cloud ALM with the readiness check.
This is available today, you can look at it, and I think feedback so far has been great on that one. Second is, use the influencing capabilities that we provide you with our continuous influencing on Cloud ALM. Third one is get your solution transformation consultant badge here on Friday.
More information, if you are not yet registered, will come from my colleagues. And then adopt the transformation suite, obviously only in the capabilities where it exists with its integration. Now we’re a little bit more out, admitted, but LinaX and enable now integration more around the corner.
With that said, I would like to thank you for your interest. I would like to especially say thank you that you took time out of your busy schedules to come here to invest in your ALM skills, but also to invest in this community by networking and making new friends. So enjoy ALM Summit.
And with that, I would first of all like to thank you and you can now have an applause quickly for me. All theory from Waldorf is nice, right? The best is always to hear from a customer, how they look at transformation, how they would like to work with
The transformation suite going forward, how they use today’s capabilities that were explained already. And I’m happy to have someone very knowledgeable. So he is first of all the DSAG, the German user group board member for technology. And today he talks in his capacity as the head of digital transformation
At Deutsche Bahn, the German railroad, Sebastian Westphal. Yeah, thank you. Good morning. Thanks for having me, and I’m very sorry, but unfortunately we are ahead of schedule, and it’s something that our company is not very well known for at the moment.
So, I try to keep the schedule and to speed up a bit. So, is it working already? Yes, it does. Oh, 30 seconds. Okay, just a short filler. So, I would like to share some of the insights of the transformation that is currently taking place at Deutsche Bahn.
So, and I would like to Mark’s presentation about the internal needs for business transformation. So, first of all, what we have is a massively changing enterprise. What we are currently doing is, we are bringing together stations, rail network and all services to one company.
With one additional requirement, it’s not just we are doing it for a purpose. We got a lot of money, about 45 billion euros, which is quite a lot, to get a transformation done. And what for? For a resilient infrastructure. So everybody here in the room may be aware of the problems
That the German Railroad Network is currently facing. So that’s the core goal to achieve with our transformation and by the way it pays to the national strategy for a sustainable transportation concept. And I’m nearly with Mark about ingredients. I’m mentioning three of them instead of four, because two go hand in hand.
One is a clear strategy. So we didn’t ask McKinsey or all the guys that you mentioned a strategy from the government and from the politicians. So they force us to reinvent into the network and the goal is clear, all should need to join forces, government, politics,
Building industry and of course all the people at Deutsche Bahn. And when we’re talking about a railroad network, it’s not about virtual products or software as I guess many here in the room or software companies are working for. So it’s about 180 years of tradition in iron and steel.
It’s physical products but also becoming a digital business model and a digitized company. So we have both processes and hardcore tech and a lot of software and automation potential. But the biggest value for us is the people. 300,000 people in Germany working for the German Railroad Network.
A long tradition and the backbone of our company is not the software, but the blue-collar worker out in the field. This is an energy business, maintaining the railroad network, running the trains and providing all the services. So, this is the transformation that DogeBan is currently about.
Let’s set the scene for an SAP transformation. So the starting point is a bit different, at larger scale, and of course we need to adopt our SAP, our ERP systems as well. So first of all, starting point, running roughly 20 ERP solutions at the whole group.
It’s not that awful because we’ve one core ERP system, we’ve got one chart of accounts. That’s a starting situation where many companies dream of. It’s not that bad. And yes, of course, support is ending, so we need to transform. And what do we want to achieve? And that’s, you know, that’s easy.
Standard processes, because we are earning money not with brilliant finance processes, but with, you know, running the railroad. So, standardized processes are stable, resilient and becoming more efficient and gain more automation. I just mentioned 300,000 people working for us. We need to replace, and that’s about demographics, 100,000
People in the upcoming seven years. That’s just impossible. So, major trends in our core business are pushing the ERP transformation into a special edge that we need to achieve. Our infrastructure is outdated. We are facing a lot more traffic. So, we need to provide more services with less staff,
Because you just don’t get them. We have a lot more security requirements. We all know what’s happening worldwide. So, it’s a physical network that is attacked, and it’s a software network that is attacked. Unfortunately, as we are funded by the government, financial resources are not endless. So, what do we need to do?
We need to take major steps in parallel. First of all, our assets are spread all over the nation. Today, I’m going to talk about how we can use the data from the northern part, next to the coastal line, down to the Alps. So, asset management is key.
And that differentiates us from all other industries, and is a very special requirement that we need to cover with our systems as well. And we need to enhance the data that we are using. There’s a lot of semi-manual or manual or semi-automatic processes and data gathering.
So, we need to bring all the data that we need, satellite data, geo data and so on, together and automate it. So get all the information that you need on your device where you need it. There’s a lot of quality assurance that we need to make sure.
Yeah, we are not that good at the moment. I know, but that’s what the transformation is about. So, we need to be robust, but flexible in our systems. And once you’ve seen the maintenance process of a high-speed train, believe me, that’s a different story.
It’s not about the maintenance processes of a software, I’m sorry. It’s quite complex and you feel better if it’s done properly when you’re sitting in the train. So, and why we need to save not only money, but get the right people on board
And less people on board, we need to use all automation potential that’s available and now it’s my gen.ai moment. We need this artificial intelligence to run our maintenance processes, not just in the core finance, but that’s what pushes our ERP systems forward.
All the maintenance systems and these are the large ERP systems are the ones that are really crucial to us. And to be honest, there is a big co-innovation project with SAP running because even SAP standard processes are not enough to run our business. So, basic data, quite simple.
We have 20 legacy SAP systems, program about 500 people working on the transformation now for three years. In the end, we will have 60,000 core end users on the system. All major business entities of the Deutsche Bahn will be affected and it’s very expensive. Today, I’m going to talk about a business transformation.
Talking about the transformation suite, we should be the perfect customer to dive into the transformation suite, and we really would like to. So, that was the core picture that Mark showed us and thanks for your honesty, Mark. That’s much appreciated because now I’m going to talk a little bit about our experience.
This story is a bit similar to our situation. It sounds like a perfect story, but it is a hell of work to do. So that’s the way how it feels like currently. And if you’re using our services, you’re aware of this information. Sorry, news about construction sites, and that’s exactly how the transformation
Suite approach currently feels like, or how we experience it. It’s not about criticizing, we just learned it’s a long journey, and we are keen to stick onto this journey. But first, when we’re talking about processes, we really would like to share Signabius’ vision on that.
And we’re using it for building the future of process management. So what would you like to see? Continuous management of processes, heat map, process insights analysis, explore best practices, get the content out of the vendors solution portfolio, and overarching process management with integrated implementation testing functionalities.
That’s how it should look like, but we are a huge Ariba and ECC customer and we are one of the first large scale groups that move to AWS for instance. So it’s not about cloud on-premise, it’s about the sheer size what we need.
And just looking into Ariba and S4, we still would like to analyze end-to-end processes. But there is still a gap. If it’s one platform, Ariba, and the other platform is four on the other side, it’s not possible to manage the processes jointly.
So you still see that the SAP product or price list has an effect on the services that the solution is providing. They are working on that, but currently that’s painful because you want this easy adoption, you want this easy insights that are still work in progress.
And there’s another thing, and Mark, you mentioned that it’s… When we started our transformation program a couple of years ago, Signavio wasn’t there, Solution Manager was still the core tool to go for, so we’ve got a lot of documentation already available. And it’s not just a couple of pages, that’s tons of material.
And how do we get this moved into Signavio and moved into Cloud ALM? Mark mentioned it, that’s still an open issue, but that’s for us and really crucial to follow this transformation suite approach because that’s the core of the knowledge that we build into the software running our business transformation project.
And by the sheer size of it, you can imagine that’s tons of documentation. So, the roadmap is packed and we know that the team is working on that. And we have a very close exchange with Gero on that as well.
But still, it’s not as we would like to see it and as we would like to use it. This is Cloud Elam. Mark, thank you for all your details and especially for the critical questions and the answers on that. Now you’re announcing the transformation suite and we really would like to stick
To that. But currently it’s a bit like, you know, a construction kit. We’ve just heard it. So we’re currently using Solution Manager, unfortunately, to support implementation. Maybe from 24, 25ish on will be a different story, but many services that the solutions are offering are similar.
So there is test management capabilities in various tools or support. There is documentation, and we would like to see, as Mark mentioned, one capability in one solution, orchestrated as a complete suite. And that makes it really difficult to dive into one
Specific solution, because you don’t know, is that the target for in two or three years’ time. And that’s really crucial to us, because I just shared some of the facts and the sheer size of the program. You don’t want to do it twice, so that’s what we really need,
Is how do we bring the content from our current S4 project setup and all the test plans and all the test cases and all the test automation towards the future transformation suite. And that, unfortunately, is the major pain point that we are facing currently.
And we just heard the first answers still take some time. Linux, we are a step further, surprisingly, for the John Railroad. So we are a Linux customer for two years now. And just to give you some facts, it’s about 18,000 named users, 2,500 IT
Components and roughly 5,000 applications that we are managing in there. So that’s the core enterprise architecture management tool. And we like it and we built a lot of interfaces, you know, to mainly outgoing to support software asset management, emergency management, security management.
And of course, at least for the components to support process management. But even for Linix, it’s a bit similar to what I just explained or shared about Signavio. Using Linix is very, very time-consuming. Mark mentioned that that’s manual work.
You can’t imagine how long it took to get all these data into the platform. Now it’s working brilliantly and we really like all the graphics and all the outcomes, but it’s a single source of truth. And please, we would like to get some more automation and import help
Because you don’t want to go through that hell of a ride. And that’s exactly what we are working on as Deutsche Bahn with Linux. So they are aware of that and we are trying to build generic interfaces to support specially major solutions in the SAP context,
But from outside as well like, you know, the Atlassian products or ServiceNow. Am I allowed to mention ServiceNow in here? Yeah, maybe. Maybe not. So that’s what they are working on, but it’s still a way to go to reach this vision of a transformation speed.
And they need to sort out one major issue when it comes to process management. How do you bring the different levels of aggregation together? For instance, who is leading for development information? How do you define data artifacts, data categories, data catalogs and data fields?
Which tool is working on which level and how do you bring these different levels and aggregation levels together? There is, you know, a philosophy on its own for every tool and that’s what I hope you will do at first. At least give a clear vision where you will allocate the different
Details and how you bring it together, at least on a meta level. So it needs to be harmonized and it needs to be integrated. So these are the four topics that we are working on, that way we have the major pains. Project portfolio management, Mark mentioned it as well.
Not really working, not supported brilliantly by Linux. Process management, data catalog, and all about the service management infrastructure, all what we mentioned about ITSM in the past half an hour. That’s the core pain pots that we are looking at. So, solvable, brilliant topics for the world map,
And to achieve the goal of a transformation suite, that’s the homework that we would like to see first. So, in the end, to sum it up, the vision is right. We like the idea of a transformation suite, not just because of the sheer size of our company, but that’s how software implementation
Operations should look like. So, and you may name it transformation suite, whatever, maybe it’s a bit of marketing, in the end it’s ALM. It’s all about the lifecycle management of a software product from concept to requirement, project management capabilities, deployment capabilities, requirements management, test management, test recommendation, you all know it,
And quality assurance in the end. So, we as Deutsche Bahn appreciate the work in progress and what’s going on, and we really like the vision, but it’s a long journey, and it’s a bit comparable to our situation. Our transformation is, let’s say, a three to four years project or program.
And I think we’re on the same page or the same boat, however you name it. Please move on. Don’t stop. Whatever we can do to support, Mark, you guys and your development teams to move forward and to achieve that goal, please.
Because then we will have the support that we need to focus on the core of our business transformation. So thank you. And after now 25 years in the SAP industry, I would like to answer to Stefan. He said something about integration, yes, it’s an all-time favorite, it’s all about integration.
Thank you and enjoy the ALM Summit.