SAP Cloud ALM extensions – Overview

This blog post should give an overview about the multiple ways how customers can extend their SAP Cloud ALM solution.

Overall in SAP Cloud ALM you can distinguish between several extension possibilities. In the following I will try to explain what is common and what are different approaches of these extension options.

Infrastructure Extension

SAP provides every entitled customer one single productive tenant of SAP Cloud ALM. All infrastructure for the tenant is provided by SAP without additional charges for customers. This so called “fair usage” concept contains a given infrastructure which is sufficient to most customers (~99%) . It includes, hosting at a datacenter, limited SAP HANA memory, data transfers, etc.. Just a few customers would need resources beyond the given frame ( which is defined in the SAP Cloud ALM  usage rights and in SAP Cloud terms and conditions). For those few customers there are possibilities to extend some resources with SAP Cloud ALM extension services. E.g. the current fair use includes 8GB of SAP HANA memory. An extension service for it is available in the SAP Discovery Center as Microservice. Customers should have a Cloud Platform Enterprise Agreement (CPEA) with SAP, because the automatic service charging currently is only possible if the service is activated on CPEA. A “Pay as you Go”-alternative is also available. Customers should get in contact with their account executive if they don´t have a CPE Agreement yet.

This SAP Cloud ALM memory extension is available for purchase as a package of additional 4GB SAP HANA memory for customer´s SAP Cloud ALM tenant extension. This might be relevant if:

• A customer is storing extensively data from Monitoring activities on the SAP HANA database.
• A customer is building additional UIs, dashboards in SAP Cloud ALM for which he requires additional data & memory storage.
• A large SAP customer with a big system landscape wants to store many monitoring data for a longer time period (performance, Business process- or integration monitoring).
• A customer is using additional Monitoring platforms beyond SAP landscape and is uploading monitoring data daily from a 3rd party system.

Important to know is that customers will not need to buy these services in advance.  But they will be informed by SAP if resource services will be required to continue using SAP Cloud ALM  beyond the fair use with the limited boundaries.

Another regulation is relevant for the API data outbound traffic volume which is also restricted due to cost limitations. The outbound traffic is limited to 8GB per month. An appropriate service to extend these 8 GB is currently not available yet*. Also in this case, customers will be approached from SAP if the API outbound volume breaks boundaries of given limitation, and no action is required before.

Functional extension

There are many different ways how customers can also extend their SAP Cloud ALM solution with additional functionalities. I will give an overview about the different types, but you will find blogs about many of them with even more details from SAP experts. Find the links to blogs in the text.

SAP BTP services

The SAP Business Transformation Platform is SAP´s standard extension platform and offers already many services which customers can subscribe to. We have identified a few of them which increase value of Application Lifecycle Management (ALM) processes and there are preconfigured integrations available for these services.

SAP has selected two services that are automatically provisioned with SAP Cloud ALM and are therefore at no additional costs. These services are directly provisioned in the SAP Cloud ALM subaccount as you can control in the BTP cockpit.

Currently the following services are bundled with SAP Cloud ALM:

• SAP Cloud Transport Management service (cTMS)
  • Transport Management for cloud solutions. Please read the blog Interplay of SAP Cloud ALM and SAP Cloud Transport Management Service for detailed information.
  • Usage Rights for SAP Cloud Transport Management are up to 4GB of bandwidth (defined as an amount of data traffic transmitted and received by the Cloud Service) which is included in SAP Cloud ALM fair use .
• Cloud Integration Automation Service (CIAS)
  • The Cloud Integration Automation Service (CIAS) provides an infrastructure for describing and executing Integration Scenarios – automatically where possible.

Another group of BTP services are available as Free Tier offering with a limited scope of usage. This perfectly evaluate the need and benefits of such a service. In case of a more intensive usage, it is very easy to update from Free Tier on a Standard service subscription. The meterings and charging conditions are varying with each services. Booking happens directly in the Discovery Center or the BTP cockpit. These services are then provisioned in customer´s global account.

Here are the services which are currently relevant for SAP Cloud ALM use cases, in this category:

SAP Cloud ALM APIs

The next category of extensions can be found on SAP API Business Hub. There you can find all SAP Cloud ALM APIs. Many of the previously mentioned services are built on  existing APIs that has been designed for  several capability areas of SAP Cloud ALM. The API Hub  approaches to offer open APIs, that could be consumed from customers and partners flexibly to connect 3rd party tools from an existing ALM process to extend particularly functionalities in the process that are not provided from SAP Cloud ALM itself.

Here is a list of currently (November/22) available APIs:

• SAP Cloud ALM Analytics
• SAP Cloud ALM Business Service Management
• SAP Cloud ALM Tasks
• SAP Cloud ALM Event Situation (for SN available, generic in process)
• SAP Cloud ALM Projects
• SAP Cloud ALM Test Automation
• SAP Cloud ALM Resource Changes
• SAP Cloud ALM Process Management

I would like to reference here on a blog post series from Xavier DUPEYRAT who is publishing a detailed blog about every new API that is becoming available. Please follow his series “SAP Cloud ALM Extend with APIs “ https://blogs.sap.com/2021/08/05/sap-cloud-alm-extend-with-apis-introduction-use-cases

Bring your own content

Many of these APIs are leveraged to an integrated Up/ Download functionality integrated in some SAP Cloud ALM capabilities to support the following use cases:

• Mass Upload and Mass Update in Task Management supports customers and partners to import their own Methodology content into SAP Cloud ALM.
  Upload own methodololgy content with open APIs for Project and Tasks.
• In Process Authoring create own Solution Processes. Model Solution Value Flows, Solution Process Flows and diagrams.
  Upload own content with open APIs for Process Scope* and Custom Process*.
• Create own manual test cases in Test Preparation. With Mass Upload and Mass Update customers and partners can import own Test content into SAP Cloud ALM. Upload test content with open APIs for  Test Automation and Test cases*.
• Create own Requirements, User Stories and Defects directly in SAP Cloud ALM. With Mass Upload and Mass Update customers and partners can import their own content into SAP Cloud ALM.

Solution extensions

Solution extensions are additional major solutions from either SAP or OEM Partners which are deeply integrated in the processes of SAP Cloud ALM.

They are providing a reduced scope of functionality from their origin tool. But according to our fair-use concept it will be sufficient functionalities for most customers and they will add value to the existing SAP Cloud ALM functionalities. It is also possible for customers to enhance these functionalities to gain even more value from these solutions with additional licenses for the full or selected scope. After purchasing the full license , the full scope of functionality is available.

On the SAP Cloud ALM roadmap are currently following solutions *

Business Process transformation from SAP (aka SAP Signavio) will provide the SAP Signavio Process Manager in SAP Cloud ALM. Concrete dates when this will be available are not communicated yet.

Application Testing Automation by Tricentis will be provided with SAP Cloud ALM as part of a partnership between SAP and Tricentis (Concrete dates when this will be available are not communicated yet). This allows customers to create automated test cases on almost every UI. If customers are looking for more test functionalities of the Tricentis portfolio it is possible to extend the scope with additional licenses for :

A further integration of an SAP toolon our SAP Cloud ALM platform is SAP Business Transformation Center (BTC) which is  included in RISE with SAP. It will be used for customers to do a streamlined and guided data migration and transformation experience. So it speed up migration and transformation projects by reducing planning and execution complexity. (Planned for 2023)

Wrap up

The following picture summarizes the fair use concept across the different SAP Cloud ALM extensions and shows which commercial impact it will have to use SAP Cloud ALM beyond the fair use concept.

*This is the current state of planning and may be changed by SAP at any time