The issue is important because the calculation of indirect/digital access could undermine compliance exposure if the total purchased is less than what is measured and reported in the LAW (License Administration Workbench), which is SAP's required self-verification of licensing position.
This metric, in fact, was introduced by SAP to shed light on the gray areas around the concept of “use” to be licensed when there was no direct access to the system, especially in the presence of devices, bots or automated systems, but also human figures accessing via non-SAP intermediary software (EDI interfaces, third-party CRM systems, mobile, IoT) to the SAP core.
Now with the new model, based on results and not users, SAP customers can license their indirect access to SAP based on the number and type of documents created, regardless of the number of users and systems connecting to the system.
As long as the count is correct: It is, in fact, important to know how many digital documents will be created in order to size the licensingThen there are scenarios that do not require licensing (situations where access may fall under named licenses or where Indirect Static Read occurs, etc.) that need to be analyzed on a case-by-case basis in order to optimize the final cost to put on the table.
In this regard in WEGG we support companies in estimating the number of digital documents based on usage data and also predicting roadmaps of future evolutions in the analyses (e.g., automation with RPA bots creates indirect accesses, which must be provided in a granular way in all their integrations).
This ensures better decision making in negotiations with the purchase of licenses in the appropriate quantities (neither too many nor too few), while maintaining compliance at all times.
3) Additional licenses for add-on modules
Rise with SAP also provides industry and LOB solutions with add-on licenses. Among the optional add-on applications we can also find “engine”: in this case the metrics are unique to each engine and and are based on the objects within the application (be they users, turnover, ecc.) and can be measured by the product or self-reported by the customer.
Licenses with this type of metric are unlikely to be optimizable because they are most often business-related numbers. In any case, the presence of multiple metrics makes it difficult to count them as a whole and have a glimpse of the consumption metric.
In this regard, we point out SAP4Me, the new centralized platform in SAP (we expressed our feedback here), which, within Finance&Legal in the Consumption section, allows you to have a a single view on SAP's cloud product licensing documents where they are grouped by metrics and there are then columns dedicated to measuring consumption, which also highlight the delta (in orange) in case of over-utilization.