Massive licensing needs for all companies

There is talk of SAP changing the basis for granting named user licenses from "actual usage" to usage based on "existing entitlements."

Usual salami tactics from Walldorf

In 2017, SAP already started to "tune up" the community for the upcoming change. For 2018, it has announced that it will not only release a new version of the USMM, but also announce how the use of user licenses based on authorizations will look in concrete terms.

What is certain is that with the new version of the USMM, SAP will put further obstacles in the way of customers and optimized license management for SAP named user licenses will once again become more difficult and complex.

As a rule, employees have more authorizations for their daily work than they actually need. If their activities change, they require different authorizations, which can lead to a higher or lower license requirement.

If SAP gets serious in the next measurement, it would basically have to revoke the authorization from every user who does not use it. Companies that do not have an optimized SAP authorization concept and corresponding change processes will have to buy expensive additional licenses in the future. This will result in a massive demand for licenses worldwide.

It's in there - what to do now?

From a cost and compliance perspective, the end-to-end integration of license management into existing authorization systems is now imperative. In terms of effective authorization management, companies and groups must provide all the information that makes it possible to map authorizations.

There are additional criteria that limit the allocation of authorizations, such as legal and data protection requirements or company policy requirements. Those who perform this reconciliation manually will very quickly face a problem, because they are missing the entire aspect of license metrics, which are usually not linked to internal authorization management.

A consolidated authorization concept adapts the authorizations provided to the actual usage required. However, since a user's actual rights arise from the combination of all his or her authorizations, an SAP role-specific view is not sufficient here.

Due to the increasingly dynamic work environment and the associated frequency of change, such requirements can only be implemented with an automated tool.

The ideal tool takes into account the additional dimension of the licensing metric when assigning entitlements and determines what it would cost to switch from "usage-based" to "entitlement-based."

In the first step, it identifies the actual license requirement based on usage and then compares this with the license requirement from the existing authorizations. Furthermore, it can be easily integrated into existing authorization management systems.

Pure consulting will not get you anywhere at this point, just consider the time factor! IT managers are now faced with the choice of using considerable manpower to try to close the existing gap or using the upcoming change as an opportunity to introduce an automated solution.

Perhaps it helps to know that companies have realized millions of dollars in savings by using an SAP license management tool, depending on the size of the company.

This was only possible because their tool, with its dynamic rule sets, was able to map SAP's license metrics more granularly. Now is the ideal time for all those companies that are still operating manually. And those who additionally do not yet have authorization management should seize the opportunity and combine the two.