New at Snow: SAP 3.1 and Oracle Java Management Releases
We’re excited to announce several new releases across our portfolio of products, designed to help users manage the largest technology vendors. These expanded capabilities help IT teams improve visibility into their technology ecosystems, understand and manage their consumption and reduce unnecessary costs.
Control SAP spend, regardless of deployment method
We have seen SAP continuing to focus its efforts on increasing adoption of its Cloud products, with SAP reporting a $366M increase in cloud revenue for the first half of their financial year, and encouraging companies to move to S/4HANA, where they have seen a 17% adoption increase this year.
Snow Optimizer for SAP Software 3.1 offers expanded depth and breadth of functionality to help customers reduce manual effort and ensure they are not paying more than necessary for their software licenses. Explore some of the key features from the release below.
Increasing S/4HANA public cloud visibility
Many customers deploy a hybrid deployment of their SAP ERP landscape, where they run most of their large and important ERP business processes on-premises, using ECC or S/4HANA, and other processes in the cloud. In this latest version, customers also have visibility into the S/4HANA cloud licensing data, giving them insights into their licensing data, regardless of the deployment method adopted.
Role-based licensing and authorizations
Many customers have a requirement to not just be able to change their user master data but to change their authorization roles as well. With Snow Optimizer for SAP Software 3.1, customers can change access rights from within Snow Optimizer. Administrators can see which roles have been assigned to a user, and what functionality is actually used, allowing them to easily remove access to all the functionality that is not being used and deliver value from a security perspective.
At Snow, we believe that SAP may choose to audit based on roles and authorizations in the future. With this new functionality, customers will be able to easily control access rights assigned to users and validate the assignment of users against what has been assigned in the system.
Enhanced contract management
With Snow Optimizer for SAP Software 3.1, customers will now be able to build metrics to model when multiple engine metrics are in use, as is the case for some standard engines, improving accuracy, reducing reliance on external consultants and saving the time it takes to manually calculate engine measurements.
Visibility of applications running on the HANA database
If a customer has bought a runtime license, they are able to run S/4HANA on the HANA database, but to run other native applications a full use license is required. This could lead to potential compliance risk. Snow Optimizer for SAP Software 3.1 can show you which native applications have been installed and measure the results of these applications so you can ensure you have the right balance of runtime and full use licensing.
Advanced compliance analysis functionality
Allow customers to retain, analyze and compare historical compliance data giving them improved, long-term visibility of their compliance position.
Take control of Oracle Java licensing
Before Oracle changed the licensing rules for Java in 2019, many companies used this technology to run their applications because it was essentially free.
However, in 2019, Oracle changed the licensing metric and made it so that any version after 8u202 required a commercial license when using Java for business, commercial or production use. The license metric is based on Oracle’s Named User Plus (NUP) licensing type and its processor licensing. NUP licensing is fairly simple to calculate as it’s based on the number of individuals who have access to Java, but customers are still struggling to understand the number of licenses actually required in their organization.
When we look at datacenter usage and processor licensing, understanding license requirements becomes far more complex and the costs can ramp up significantly, especially when applying Oracle’s virtualization rules to Java. For larger companies, it would be easy to ramp up costs into the hundreds of thousands and millions of dollars annually.
For customers who do not use Oracle databases, these metrics will be new to them and understanding them is even more complicated.
To ensure they get their licensing right, organizations need to identify where Java is deployed, what infrastructure it’s deployed on and whether it’s virtualized.
With Snow’s latest technical preview release, we can now provide an accurate overview of the entire Java estate including chargeable commercial features, enabling customers to understand their maximum liability under the Oracle licensing rules. Join our upcoming webinar for a deeper dive into the Oracle Java licensing model and to see how Snow provides better visibility into usage.
Leading through new challenges
At Snow, we believe that IT leaders who are empowered with end-to-end visibility of their technology consumption and resulting spend are better prepared to make strategic decisions and keep their organization resilient during these times of change and uncertainty.
Request a demo to see how these new features can help your organization today and into the future.