End of support for ECC seems to consume the oxygen in the room lately, but a less covered topic might be more critical and have a larger near term impact on large enterprises planning or in flight with S/4 migration projects. This event is potentially more disruptive than the end of support for ECC, directly impacting the ability of customers to continue IT operations for SAP.

That topic and event is the end of Solution Manager. SAP’s end of support decisions, aimed at incentivizing the move to S/4, includes consequences for customers using Solution Manager functionality. The end of support for Solution Manager – included with SAP ECC as part of current maintenance, and continued availability depending on existing on prem SAP maintenance agreements – creates exposure for any customer using Solution Manager today.

Those impacts might be very real, as Solution Manager covers a lot of ground with SAP operations. Making it worse, even customers on extended maintenance through 2030 will lose some portions of Solution Manager in 2027 per SAP Note 3255311.

Ancillary functionality near and around Solution Manager, including Focused Build, Focused Insights, Focused Run and Lama all have a similar fate and varying dates for end of support. For basis teams, the end of Solution Manager might be the bigger story of 2027 – and the end of support announcement and lack of recent roadmap commitments make it clear that Solution Manager is effectively End of Life already.

What’s the exposure?

Solution Manager includes a broad range of functionality around SAP IT operations, creating a potential for disruption in many SAP deployments. Test case management, risk based testing, test data management, technical monitoring, change/transport management, security, process management, infrastructure management, landscape management and more.

Frustratingly, the successor to Solution Manager, Cloud ALM, is still years from parity in many functional categories and may never have all the features of Solution Manager in others. This leaves many enterprises with a daunting challenge for the gap left by the end of support for ECC and Solution Manager, but before a full decommissioning of all ECC environments becomes possible.

So… what to do?

Given many of the SAP product names, the opportunity for lame jokes and bad gags is irresistible (“don’t take your Lama on an unfocused run!”), but the potential exposure for many large enterprises and SAP operations is a serious topic.

No one solution replaces all Solution Manager functionality in an ECC environment, however, many solutions cover a specialized segment of capability and often more comprehensively with better functionality. With an understanding of the most important aspects of Solution Manager coverage to a given enterprise, a choice can be made for a replacement solution, and one likely to have additional technical and operational cost benefits.

Observability, Engagement, Action

Avantra covers many key aspects of SAP IT operations, including improvements on Solution Manager components for monitoring, landscape management, ITSM integration, and Security Notes / Hot News implementation. One could replace Solution Manager, Focused Run, and Lama with Avantra 24 and expect to improve in the following areas:

• Monitoring across on prem, hyperscaler, and RISE, with AIOps for automatic, real time observability far beyond simple thresholds.
• ITSM Integration to enterprise solutions including Service Now.
• Landscape Management tasks and automation.
• Automation for many SAP operations tasks with a robust workflow engine built in.
• System Refresh – including automatic execution of pre and post copy activities often accelerating refresh by 10x or more.
• Automating Hot News and Security Notes, essentially eliminating evaluation/applicability research and verification and automating deployment in many situations.
• AI that works and is specific to SAP IT operations with Avantra AIR.

This isn’t a complete list – there’s more Avantra 24 and Avantra AIR do for SAP IT operations! And, for other portions of Solution Manager – including Testing, Data & Change Management – we have friends and we’re happy to speak with you about them.

SAP SAFARI!

So, ride (limp?) your Lama into the sunset, but don’t sweat Solution Manager’s End of Life. While the end of support can present a challenge for ECC users planning to operate past 2027, the SAP ecosystem, including Avantra, provides a range of solutions generally more capable, more flexible and often with a lower total cost of operation than standard SAP IT operations tooling. In fact, replacing Solution Manager with improved functionality from 3^rd party vendors is a time honored practice in SAP IT operations. Now there’s an extra nudge to go ahead, dive in and improve.