Just a few weeks ago, before our recent product release, I had a conversation with one of our oldest customers who has been successfully using Snow Optimizer for SAP® Software, our license management solution for SAP customers, for many years.
"Look," he said, "I have a problem. You probably read in the press that we have gone through a merger? Before that, we were a much smaller company, but now, my team and I are responsible for SAP licensing for the entire group. There are five new subsidiaries, which are mostly independent companies, and I have no idea how many SAP systems they have —probably hundreds— let alone how many users are on these systems and what's actually in use. It's a complete mess!"
He paused, "And next year we have to consolidate all SAP contracts and renegotiate with SAP. Do you have any idea what we can do to get this under control as fast as possible?"
And this customer isn’t alone. Over the last few years, our customer base for Snow Optimizer for SAP has grown to include more and more large international corporations. Several of them have experienced similar problems: largely autonomous subsidiaries, each with their own independently managed SAP environments, processes, security policies and politics.
They found that it usually takes a long time to liaise with each system owner to get access, obtain the necessary authorizations, and burn holes through the firewalls between individual SAP systems and the central so-called 'Master system.' The larger the company gets, the more time-consuming the whole operation becomes. If there are additional time-constraints, as in the case of our customer described at the beginning of this post, the situation can become unmanageable.
Introducing Supermaster
Following a series of good discussions with some of our largest customers, we decided we needed to go one step further to support them. Which is why we are introducing the new 'Supermaster' feature. As teased in our recent product release, Snow is first-to-market with this new functionality, which allows subsidiaries to install their own Snow Optimizer in their Master systems. They can have independent control of their environments with the ability to connect these separate systems, or Submasters, directly to a central instance of Snow Optimizer — the Supermaster.
In this Supermaster instance, the user has full visibility of all individual SAP systems connected to it, either directly or indirectly, through the Submasters in the subsidiaries. They can initiate changes to user master data for every user in all systems, while still allowing the people in charge of the subsidiaries to maintain full control.
With Supermaster, organizations can outsource the most tedious and time-consuming tasks to people who know and manage their environments, and do it in a fraction of the time. The parent organization maintains visibility of these activities, can keep track of the assets across the entire global subsidiary base and can make more strategic decisions about their SAP environment with comprehensive data.
Learn more
Stay tuned for more developments on our Snow Optimizer for SAP. But in the meantime, learn 5 steps you can take to cut spending on your SAP Software.
