SAP Business Suite Discovery Capabilities from Tideway Foundation

  by Edoardo L’Astorina | 22 Sep 2009 | Permalink | Featured, Home Page, Software, Software Business Models

With the release of TKU September 2009, Tideway is now able to discover SAP Business Suite out-of-the-box.

This new functionality allows Tideway to address critical SAP related problems such as Change Impact produced by a Data Center Move and License Management.

Approach to Understanding the Product
Following our previous work with Oracle E-Business Suite, we continued to expand our coverage of business applications by working on SAP Business Suite.

The approach that we employed was very similar: a combination of Tideway internal expertise, and external Subject Matter Experts. In this particular case, we worked side by side with QuestAM, who provided us with invaluable data, guidelines, and a test lab for the development and final testing of our work.

Tideway Capabilities for SAP Business Suite Mapping
Tideway is able to identify an instance of SAP spread across multiple hosts in your estate, and supported by multiple Application Servers. Tideway will also indicate the location of the supporting Database for each SAP instance. Currently supported DBs are: Microsoft SQL Server & Oracle Database Server. Support for IBM DB2 is under development.

The functionality described above are performed by Tideway in a normal Discovery, where only host credentials are supplied. Once the supporting Databases are singled out, a user can provide Tideway Foundation with Credentials for those DBs, thus allowing for a much deeper Discovery to take place.

After logging into the Database, Tideway will execute a set of DB Queries, which will return valuable data. It will return version-related data, like SAP Version, Release, and Type (ie. ERP, CRM, Netweaver…).

The DB Queries will also return Licensing Data, like License Key, License Expiry Date & Maximum Users allowed. This data is particularly interesting in view of a License Audit.

Finally, the DB Queries will return a list of Installed Components, which can clearly identify the use which a given SAP Instance is intended for (ie, EA-FINSERV for Financial Services, EA-HR for Human Resources…). The ability to distinguish among different Components of SAP is a great advantage in a Data Center Move/Upgrade, as it allows to understand which Applications are going to be affected by shutting specific hosts down.

In conclusion, whether your goal is preparing for a License Audit, preventing outages caused by change, or performing a discovery & software mapping of your Data Center, Tideway Foundation is an excellent tool that will make you aware, in just a few steps, of your SAP deployment across your estate.

For a visual explanation, please refer to the In the Spotlight page on Configipedia. For a more detailed technical explanation, please refer to the SAP Business Suite product page.

Tideway is always interested in understanding where the highest demand for product mapping lies. Would you be interested in seeing more Business Applications mapped like SAP Business Suite? Is your main focus on PeopleSoft? Or Siebel? Or something else? Please do not hesitate and let us know.

Edoardo L’Astorina