Our SAP Effective License Position (ELP) gives you an enterprise-wide view of the current state of your SAP licensing and compliance. This provides you with the intelligence and insight you need to get compliant – and stay compliant. By helping you to identify and mitigate compliance concerns in advance, you can dramatically reduce the time and costs required at the audit stage.
SAP Effective License Position
Vendor audits are on the increase and can result in costly and unexpected license fees
Effective license position stages
Contract review
By reviewing your SAP master agreement and support maintenance contract(s) – including annual invoices and order forms – we can produce a bill of material (BOM) to outline your terms of software use, entitlements and associated metrics. This will also include a total cost of ownership summary.
Named-user measurement
The named-user licensing (NUL) measurement stage is a key step in establishing your SAP effective license position as it provides an accurate view of the named-user licensing your business needs, compared to the assets you currently hold. By establishing the total number of unique named-users, the process identifies surplus or shortfall against each named-user license type within your contract (as documented in the BoM) or other applicable license types. It also helps identify and remove duplicated users. We convert contractual definitions to technical definitions according to your contract, and then perform a measurement per individual named-user license type. For each user we review their authorizations (what they can do) and compare that to historical usage (what has been done). The measurement itself depends on the client’s contractual definitions.
Packages measurement
While named-user license metrics are more or less consistent for all organizations, SAP packages are licensed based on business metrics. For many core and non-core SAP products, you need a package to use that solution. Due to the SAP marketplace, it is easy for organizations to use SAP system functionality that they haven’t purchased, and as your organization expands, you might unknowingly exceed your entitlement, leading to non-compliant use. The SAP packages measurement detects unlicensed package usage and determines over or under-use of package licenses by comparing your consumption against your entitlement.
Indirect software use
Using SAP software processes and capabilities requires a license – however, you access the software. When a user or third-party application views, creates or changes data in SAP systems via an interface, we can evaluate that use.
Unlike direct use when users access the SAP interface with a user ID and password, detecting indirect use is more complex.
Depending on the client and the SAP landscape, we use SAP license audit tools, specialist tools, SAP landscape documentation and business process documentation. Once we have identified any unlicensed software use, we can quantify the potential risk to your business and propose mitigation plans and licensing options.License optimization
We can optimize your licenses in a number of ways to reduce your total cost of ownership. Technical optimization means we review users’ authorizations and compare them to historical usage. This may involve redesigning some roles. Commercial optimization focuses on the redundant software and reviews whether the associated support can be cancelled or credited against future purchases.
Key benefits
Compliance approach
If you were audited by SAP tomorrow, do you know what the outcome would be? We review your licensing and compliance position across the entire landscape. Our SAP license evaluation process compares your actual usage of SAP software with your license position, to give you an accurate view of licensing requirements and compliance concerns. This gives you a benchmark of how you would perform if you were audited by SAP.
Optimization
If your organization is compliant, optimization can free up your entitlement which can be sometimes be used as a credit against a future purchase. If you are non-compliant, it can correct factors that result in using a higher number of licenses than you need to ensure a compliant position.
Business Benefits
- Discover any non-compliance before the license measurement
- Reveal licensing risks that SAP’s standard measurement tools cannot measure
- Discover whether your software asset management tool is providing a false sense of security
- Remediate under-licensing
- Retain previously negotiated discounts and avoid back-dated maintenance
- Address technical factors falsely inflating license deployment and use
- Get an accurate and concise view of your entire SAP licensing estate
- Identify opportunities to optimize SAP licenses
- Understand how to maintain a compliant and optimized licensing position
Results
- The ITAA SAP license evaluation reveals a more accurate and realistic view of licensing than the standard SAP measurement tools, such as USMM and SLAW. These tools count how many SAP licenses have been allocated by the systems administrator, but this has no direct link to contract definitions, user authorizations or actual use.
Our SAP license evaluation gives you an enterprise-wide view of your licensing and compliance position, also known as an Effective License Position (ELP). This provides you with the intelligence and insight you need to get compliant – and stay compliant.
Our SAP license evaluation process compares your actual usage of SAP software with your license position, to give you an accurate view of licensing requirements and compliance concerns. This gives you a benchmark of how you would perform if you were audited by SAP.
