A quick trip to St. Leon-Rot

From 17 to 18.05, SAP hosted the ALM Partner Conference in St. Leon-Rot, Germany. As part of the ALM Partnerhub, we too were invited to the exclusive event. During our visit to SAP’s second-largest campus, they demonstrated the future of SAP Cloud ALM, the current status, what to expect, and what will happen with SAP Solution Manager.

The first day of the ALM Partner Event

Getting there was already a fun experience. I joined my Swiss colleagues in Zürich from where we all carpooled to St. Leon-Rot. Along the way, we had to stop for a quick customer meeting before we finally arrived for the first day of the immersive experience.

On our way to the SAP ALM Partner event — Pitstop Meeting at a rest stop on the A5 near Baden Baden

Our day at SAP’s started out with a one-to-one meeting with Marc Their and David Birkenbach. We discussed our current painpoints and which list for future SAP innovations. Later that day, once all partners arrived and were tested for COVID, the official part of the Partner’s event kicked off with a keynote on “The Future of ALM” and continued with News and Announcements for ALM Partners. The day ended with a fantastic barbecue and exciting discussions amongst all partners.

The second day

The second day focused more on activities and workshops, including Partner Success Stories by SIMAC, Cpro, and SNP.

The biggest concern was what would happen with SAP Solution Manager when SAP Cloud ALM takes over most of the operations and implementation topics. SAP still strongly recommends using SAP Solution Manager. 2027 is not the end for Solution Manager, but it will have long-term support, allowing us to continue using it afterward. Solution Manager is more beneficial for on-premises landscapes with multiple ABAP and non-ABAP systems that require monitoring 24/7 since CALM only supports ABAP systems. If your landscape is small and only consists of ABAP systems or S/4HANA Cloud systems, then CALM is the best option. Not to forget the fact here that if you already own any kind of cloud product, then CALM is for free.

Moreover, CALM will have the same essential functionalities as Solution Manager, but its representation is slightly different in terms of UI. CALM will support using APIs. For example, you can use Grafana for dashboards. CALM does not have a “Technical Dashboard” in a manner that Solution Manager has for job, health, integration monitoring, etc. For each dashboard, the user will need to navigate to different UIs. Grafana brings all the data into one dashboard.

In addition, Signavio for Business Process Operations and Tricentis for Test Automation will be available in SAP Cloud ALM. These integrations created a bunch of excitement in the community. We can’t wait to see them in the wild.

To see more information about SAP Cloud ALM on the operations side, read our Information overload 🤯

We all left the event, overloaded with the impressions and news we saw and heard and grateful for the first large in-person event since the pandemic. The blue.works crew ended the day with 🥩 and 🍺 in Basel, before heading back to the airport for my flight back to Tallinn.

Marko Laius

Marko works as an ALM Technology Expert and has extensive knowledge in the use of SAP Solution Manager with a focus on technical monitoring. He has experience in the area of SAP Basis and has also familiarized himself with test automation.