Snow Software and Akquinet Partner to Prepare Companies for SAP Licensing Changes
Stockholm, SWEDEN. August 23, 2018 – Snow Software (Snow), the global leader in Software Asset Management (SAM ) and Cloud Spend Management solutions, today announced a partnership with Akquinet, the Germany-based end-to-end IT service provider to uniquely offer governance, risk and compliance management, license optimization and Authorization-based licensing management. The last issue has become increasingly important as SAP recently discussed changes to its user licensing policy, focusing on authorizations instead of usage.
Combining the two companies’ respective SAP-certified solutions – Snow Optimizer for SAP® Software and Akquinet SAST suite – customers can benefit from greater insight into SAP licenses and authorizations and increase security and compliance. This will help them ensure license compliance and management of authorizations in their SAP systems as well as give them improved security and the ability to comply with the GDPR. They will also be prepared for the new USMM (user measurement tool) that SAP is slated to release later this year.
Snow provides all relevant functions for SAP analysis and license optimization, enabling all inactive users to be blocked and user classifications to be changed. Akquinet’s SAST suite ensures that SAP users only perform the transactions and have access to the data for which they are authorized. Together, they enable customers to streamline the number of authorizations and reduce the amount that are assigned to each user role to the bare minimum.
The advantages of the joint solution include:
- Optimization of SAP licenses and a resulting cost reduction;
- Minimization of security gaps due to unnecessary authorizations;
- Time savings as internal (manual) work is now automated, and
- Overall increase in license compliance.
Insight + License Optimization + Compliance + Security = Six Figure Savings
The Program Manager for Software Asset Management at large Foods Manufacturer in the USA says: “Using the joint offering, we first focused on our 110 Limited Professional Users and found a high number of roles per user, that the ratio between permitted and used TCODES was exceptionally high and that the number of TCODES per roles was way too high. On average, users had 145 Authorizations but actually they were only using 25. As a result, we have realized a license savings potential of between $400k to $500K for just these 110 users.”
“With Akquinet, we have an established IT service provider with many years of SAP consulting knowledge on our side. Together, we offer customers such as this large Foods Manufacturer, greater security in the areas of SAP license and authorization management and at the same time significantly reduce their costs and administrative effort,” explains Joachim Paulini, Lead Architect for Snow Optimizer for SAP Software.
Ralf Kempf, Technical Director of SAST Solutions at Akquinet adds: “Through this alliance with Snow, we are taking a significant step forward in SAP security and compliance. In addition to secure system configuration and the optimized role scope in authorization management by SAST, the license measurement by Snow enables customers to have comprehensive monitoring of licenses, ensuring compliance and risk mitigation.”