SAP continues to expand far beyond the reaches of mere data center software. The SAP that used to simply sell systems middleware and on-premises business applications a decade ago has advanced far past where many people thought it would go when it was struggling to find new markets in the early 2000s.
The company, which has morphed virtually all of its platforms into cloud services, now is moving into agile, fast-iterative and specialized software development for apps using its HANA in-memory database.
On April 27, the Germany-based software giant released new functions called Focused Build and Focused Insights for SAP Solution Manager—SAP’s central lifecycle hub for building SAP systems and solutions on premises and in the cloud.
SAP Solution Manager is a highly stable development platform that offers integrated, end-to-end management processes to all SAP support customers. Ninety-eight percent of all SAP customers buy some level of support.
Focused Build and Focused Insights, available now on SAPStore.com, enable the development of specialized features and functionality for all types of applications—cloud, mobile and on-premises—and for various verticals.
Customers with app-function needs—for example, specialized health care, financial services, or scientific use cases—beyond the standard scope of Solution Manager can now use Focused Build and Focused Insights to develop and enable specialized features on top of Solution Manager, and then make them available for digital delivery on SAPStore.com.
Focused Build helps boost efficiency in IT delivery by providing a built-in and integrated tool-supported way to manage business requirements, simple improvement requests and software development in implementing HANA-based projects.
Focused Insights allows users to tailor dashboards in their innovation and operation control centers to specific needs. They can build and distribute configurable, customer-specific dashboards in minutes without the need for custom programming. The dashboards and reports can be created to align with the user’s objectives and requirements for operations, monitoring, governance, application performance and program readiness.
Focused Insights also enables the delivery of content tailored for all roles in an organization, using the same set of indicators, from real-time metrics to long-term strategic IT key performance indicators for operators, administrators, managers and executives.
To license these solutions, go to SAPStore.com, select the number of user licenses needed, and simply purchase them with a credit card. Pricing is $284 (€250) per user per year, with a contract term of 12 months, which is renewed automatically.