The Problem with Provisioning SAP Licenses
Giving your users the correct SAP licenses is complicated. How much time do they spend in the system? How do they use the system? How do you stay compliant with your SAP license agreement? When companies have thousands of SAP users, in-depth analysis is impossible.
Standard SAP transactions help customers consolidate users from different systems and prepare the SAP license audit report. But there are no standard transaction that analyze actual SAP license usage. Customers are left guessing as to how many SAP licenses they really need.
In order to optimize SAP licenses, companies need a solution that provides real-time visibility of actual SAP license usage.
Gartner’s Take: Opportunity
According to Gartner Senior Analyst, Patricia Adams,
“Substantial cost cutting opportunities exist in monitoring usage of purchased applications. Depending upon the level of maturity, enterprises that implement software usage capabilities will achieve savings of 5% to 25% in the first year. “
“By managing software license portfolios as a continuous process, enterprises will be better equipped to respond to audits or the threat of audits.”
LicenseAuditor: SAP License Optimization
With it’s partner Xpandion, Adventier is excited to offer companies a solution for SAP License Management.
LicenseAuditor determines what companies should be paying for SAP licenses. It enables the smart purchase of future SAP licenses, as well managing dormant, underused, misclassified, and duplicate SAP licenses.
Before ordering new SAP licenses, before annual SAP license negotiations, LicenseAuditor determines for SAP customers what is required and, more importantly, what is not.
On average, SAP customers are able to reduce license audit efforts by 50%, in addition to costs saved during the SAP License optimization process.
The Instant and Ongoing SAP License Tool
LicenseAuditor enables an instant snapshot of SAP license usage. On the first day, it’s able to provide a report on a company’s SAP license usage for the past year. Customers are also able to dig into individual users to determine the correct license classification, even when the software has only been running for a few days.
In addition to the instant snapshot capability, LicenseAuditor is utilized for ongoing management and control of customers’ SAP license portfolio.
Through sophisticated algorithms, LicenseAuditor learns each user’s behavior and recommends the most suitable SAP licensing classification, according to actual daily usage.
LicenseAuditor’s graphical and statistical presentations provide ongoing visibility of SAP license usage, as well as generating periodic usage statements according to SAP license type. It also recommends the best licensing scheme for each organization, ensuring successful, ongoing SAP license management.
Most ‘Beneficial Method’ for SAP License Inspection
There are different methods to inspect SAP licenses. Calculations can be done according to amount of activity, type of usage, or activity groups – as well as pre-defined customizable best practices. There is no standard SAP program or transaction to extract this critical licensing data.
The activity group method, which is virtually impossible to perform manually, is considered by many to be the most effective. LicenseAuditor enables full customization of SAP activity groups – which are groups of different activities that fit different license types – including creation of new groups, changes in existing groups, and adding company-developed activities (Y, Z) to current groups.
Consolidating SAP Licenses
LicenseAuditor is able to combine and synchronize users’ various SAP usernames into one employee name or entity. Instead of assigning a resources to wade through the tedious manual process, LicenseAuditor automatically collects and processes SAP users in disparate SAP systems, automatically sorting them according to username, full name, email, and fuzzy connectivity. Customer-defined rules are also supported.
Automated User Provisioning
Once you’ve discovered SAP Licensing optimization opportunities, actualizing them is simple. With LicenseAuditor, you are able to automate the user provisioning process. Administrators are able to simply select all users and reclassify them immediately.
This ensures that users receive the correct SAP license, as well as saves the SAP Security team substantial time and effort. Research has shown that LicenseAuditor reduces SAP licensing provisioning efforts by up to 90%.
Conclusion
In-depth, real-time analysis of SAP license usage helps companies both reduce the time and cost of SAP license audits, as well as the overall cost of licensing SAP.
By providing instant snapshots, methods for classifications, and consolidating a user’s various usernames into a single entity, LicenseAuditor can show companies what they should be paying. SAP License Management can be streamlined and simple.
For more information, please contact us.
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