Comments on: SAP Maintenance and the Sol Man (I)

By: SAP Solution Manager continues to confuse | ZDNet

SAP Solution Manager continues to confuse | ZDNet — Thu, 03 Jun 2010 12:30:49 +0000

[...] that time, David Dobrin wrote an interesting piece on Sol Man (as it is more affectionately known) arguing that: 1. To get the benefits of the Sol Man absolutely [...]

By: Tony de Thomasis

Tony de Thomasis — Sat, 16 Jan 2010 06:38:40 +0000

David

We spoke briefly at the SAP Influence Summit in Boston late last year.

Just a short note to tell you that I will be blogging about the 10 easiest pieces of functionality to deploy as part of a SolMan deployment geared toward cutting support costs.

These blogs are based on the way we organised the SolMan roll out at Australia Post on a sensible budget. http://www.sdn.sap.com/irj/sdn/alm.

I look forward to your valued comments, Tony.

By: SAP TechEd 2009: Open Thinking

SAP TechEd 2009: Open Thinking — Sun, 01 Nov 2009 17:13:31 +0000

[...] and as a counterpoint to David Dobrin’s analysis of Solution Manager, I spent time with one of Walldorf people working on SolMan and saw a canned demo. Note: canned. [...]

By: Helmuth Guembel

Helmuth Guembel — Wed, 28 Oct 2009 08:37:13 +0000

Well, David, I agree that SAP basically had the right idea with SolMan which is to use technology to ease the chores of maintenance. But there are a number of fundamental issues with the way this was done. A big one is the lack of backward compatibility. Another one is that SolMan is complicated: I recently got a 500 page book on the enterprise edition. Among the authors are no less than 11 product managers. In the past, when projects loke OS/360 were done, such an approach was called “million monkey approach” or “Vietnamization”.
But let us assume for a moment that SolMan were the perfect product cutting the customer side of applying support by 50% or more. At this time, when even SAP experts can become redundant, many a competence center hero would rather prefer to discount the merits of SolMan to being laid off. As it turns out, SAP made SolMan sufficiently complicated and hence contributed to job security. If I had to suggest something to SAP, I’d say (once again) “put SolMan into the public domain – make it open source”. That should do wonders.

By: uberVU - social comments

uberVU - social comments — Mon, 26 Oct 2009 04:41:57 +0000

Social comments and analytics for this post…

This post was mentioned on Twitter by toppundit: @dealarchitect Is SAP really committed to reducing the TCO of installations? Posted a response to your reply. http://bit.ly/4ytyfq...

By: toppundit

toppundit — Fri, 23 Oct 2009 17:21:11 +0000

Does SAP believe that TCO should go down? Vinnie, you’ve been following this company for as long as I have, and I’m sure you remember the many, many keynotes and meetings with analysts where SAP said, basically, “Our strategy for IT in the 21st Century is to keep reducing the cost of IT and take a share of the savings.” They’ve made this commitment over and over again.

The real question is, “Have they done what they committed to doing?” You make a really good case that they haven’t. An unassailable case given the facts that we know.

So what are we to make of this? At the very least, SAP has a problem on its hands. Maybe the problem is that they, er, are not the sort of company that makes good on its public commitments. If so, that’s one sort of thing–and not exactly unusual in the software business.

Or maybe the problem is that they disagree with you (and me). Maybe they think they have made good on those commitments. This would be good, in one sense; at least we wouldn’t feel like running around muttering something about pants on fire.

But it, too, is troubling. If they really think that Sol Man is already providing benefits on a scale that would justify a price increase, either they are more confused than I’d like any software company to be or they think so poorly of you and of me and of the customer that they don’t think it’s worth the bother to make the case for what they believe.

If there is such a case, I think it’s time for them to trot it out. And if there isn’t–that is, if the points you make are right–then maybe it’s time for them to admit that they’ve gone wrong and this time make a commitment that everybody will see they can keep.

By: vinnie mirchandani

vinnie mirchandani — Fri, 23 Oct 2009 12:55:34 +0000

“SAP believes (quite correctly) that the customer’s TCO (total cost of ownership) ought to go down, as software and hardware gets better and cheaper.”

David, you heard me present on the SAP “surround” costs in the webinar yesterday – SIs, infrastructure, apps management offshore, upgrades.You saw example after example of waste in SI fees and travel, and little productivity even after tens of thousands of implementations. You saw my comparisons of today’s SAP infrastructure compared to cloud metric and with less stringent SLAs, you saw areas where offshore firms have learned the same tricks as their US colleagues.

Where is SAP in all this? Why has it not taken more responsibility for TCO management? You could argue clouds and offshore are more recent areas of focus and SAP is still learning (not an ideal situation, but somewhat understandable) but SIs? How long have you, I and others warned SAP?

On SolMan, if the justification is it makes testing lower during an upgrade that’s pretty darned weak – I am not hearing in field, audit folks saying reduce your regression or other testing becasue of SolMan. And even if it was, how do to justify paying 22% every year to get a productivity improvement in an upgrade itself with questionable ROI? Especially when in contrast SaaS vendors are showing painless, in background upgrades with downtime only a few minutes, certainly not long weekends. And no spike in fees to justify that perk.

By: SAP TCO Webinar – summary

SAP TCO Webinar – summary — Fri, 23 Oct 2009 00:09:04 +0000

[...] after the webinar, David Dobrin wrote a thoughtful piece on Solution Manager (SolMan as we usually call it.) The webinar didn’t give SolMan a lot of attention except to [...]