Moving away from SAP SolMan ITSM – what alternatives are there for SAPinsiders?

⇨ SAP is retiring its on-premise systems, including Solution Manager, as part of a cloud-first transition, with mainstream maintenance ending in 2027.

⇨ While SAP Cloud ALM offers benefits like lower costs and ease of use, it lacks vital features such as IT Service Management (ITSM), necessitating users to adopt alternative ITSM solutions.

⇨ Third-party offerings like STA Technologies’ ITSM Connector can bridge the gap by providing features similar to SolMan, facilitating the incident ticket creation process and ensuring effective incident management during the transition to cloud-based systems.

With an emphasis on a cloud-first approach, SAP announced the retirement of its on-premise systems, including Solution Manager (SolMan), the mainstream maintenance of which will finish at the end of 2027.

Released in the mid-2000s, the software platform served as an important tool for management of the lifecycle applications for SAP users. However, with today’s global cloud-first vision being prioritized, SAP is responding to the demand by making customers transition from on-premise SolMan to its cloud-based alternative – SAP Cloud ALM.

While promising many benefits, including lower costs of operation and maintenance, ease of adoption and use and provision of innovative functionality, SAP Cloud ALM lacks certain features that have been present in SolMan and can be vital for organizations, such as IT Service Management (ITSM).

Considering the complexity of modern systems, ITSM can be crucial in assisting companies in standardizing IT procedures, streamlining IT services and improving the synchronization between different departments in a company. This is particularly important in such IT practices as incident management, problem management, change management, release management and service level management, crucial in maintaining stability and efficiency in an organization.

So, what alternatives can SAP users rely on?

Since SAP Cloud ALM does not support ITSM requirements, SAP SolMan users transitioning to SAP Cloud ALM will now need to implement a new ITSM platform within their tech stack. However, according to Tamás Holics, CTO at STA Technologies, this is not necessarily a negative aspect – because there are alternative solutions that can make the ITSM functionalities in the cloud even better.

One such solution is STA Technologies’ ITSM Connector, an SAP-certified add-on that can provide the same incident ticket creation process for support requests as in SolMan.

For example, just like in SAP GUI, the add-on allows users to “go to the Help menu and press ‘Create Support Message’ item, but the ITSM Connector will be started instead of the standard SolMan popup,” Holics said.

Additionally, the add-on allows users to create tickets of different types, such as a service request for additional authorization or incidents for program errors. After pressing “send”, the ITSM Connector creates a ticket in the new ITSM platform, whatever the provider is, be it ServiceNow, Jira, 4me, Cherwell, EasyVista or others.

According to Holics, the ITSM Connector automatically routes the tickets to the relevant support team, based on transaction code, module, error message or any other criteria. It also attaches all relevant information to the tickets, so the support teams won’t have to spend hours or days sourcing details from the end users.

“Naturally,” he added, “this works with Fiori apps too. [With ITSM Connector, you can] route your Fiori incidents to the relevant teams based on Fiori App ID, technical name or module.”

By utilizing services from third-party providers like STA Technologies, organizations can equip themselves with a solution that will help them keep the familiarity and convenience of SolMan while also saving time on incident resolution. With the world gradually moving to the cloud, this is the time to embrace the add-ons which can help make the transition as smooth and easy as possible.