By Chris Hughes
SAP’s named user licensing model requires each person who accesses SAP functionality to consume a single named user license. There are a range of licenses types that may be consumed depending on each user’s role, but a fundamental part of the license model is that each user should consume one license.
Every SAP customer deals with multiple SAP systems. Smaller deployments might only have one production system, but also development and test systems. Larger organizations might spread their SAP modules across multiple systems, and others will require regional SAP deployments. In each of these scenarios, SAP customers are faced with the possibility that individuals have user accounts on multiple SAP systems and the risk of these people being double-counted from a named user licensing perspective.
SAP’s true-up tools and specifically the License Administration Workbench (LAW) have limited capabilities to avoid double-counting. SAP LAW allows organizations to nominate a single user attribute and will combine user accounts based on the value of this attribute. However, in practice this is rarely sufficient to fully optimize the resultant user counts. Mergers, acquisitions, divestitures, regional differences, changes over time and unfilled user meta-data are all real world examples where reliance on a single user attribute can be highly ineffective.
SAP Software License Optimization solutions help organizations to identify duplicate users in their organization and to overcome the limitations surrounding SAP LAW. A mature identity management solution can also help to minimize inconsistencies in user attributes and conventions between SAP systems.
Indirect Access
A basic approach to managing indirect access might include finding all business systems that exchange data with SAP systems and counting the number of users on each system. The following example captures a basic analysis of indirect access:
Business System | RFC User | User Count |
SalesForce.com | sfdc_user | 5000 |
Hyperion | hyperion_user | 1000 |
Agile PLM | agile_user | 1000 |
TOTAL | 7000 | |
At first glance, it appears that an additional 7,000 SAP named user licenses are required to cover indirect access. However, this fails to consider the likelihood that some indirect users are also direct SAP users and their SAP user account is already assigned a license type that covers their indirect usage. Or that a single user has accounts for SalesForce.com, Hyperion and Agile PLM, and only needs a single license to cover access to all these systems.
Recall the challenges that organizations face when consolidating users across multiple SAP systems using SAP LAW, and now add SalesForce.com, Hyperion and Agile PLM. I previously cited a survey in which 12 percent of respondents claimed more than 50 interfaces between SAP systems and 3rd party applications. The mind boggles at the challenges of identifying the unique users across so many business systems, each with their own concept of user identity, username conventions and requirements, etc.
A comprehensive Software License Optimization solution helps organizations to discover indirect access and provides sophisticated and fully automated user consolidation to ensure SAP named user license consumption remains fully optimized.
Indirect access poses significant license exposure for many SAP customers. However, by tackling the issue proactively and leveraging effective technologies to optimize the consumption of licenses in this scenario, organizations have a great opportunity to reduce their software license compliance risk.
Learn more-- view our on-demand Webinar: SAP License Management Challenges and Opportunities.
See also this article on the ITAM Review: SAP Licensing – is there an elephant in the room?