New tools unveiled to monitor, manage and optimize SAP environments

as they evolve to include new SAP platforms, integrations and advanced technologies.

SAP's vision of the intelligent enterprise includes SAP Data Hub, which incorporates integration and data management components, and it shows the company can embrace modern open source platforms, like Hadoop and Spark, and hybrid and multi-cloud deployment, according to Doug Henschen, an analyst at Constellation Research.

This openness, along with extending cloud initiatives to Microsoft Azure, Google Cloud Platform and IBM private cloud instances, necessitated a move to bring customers hybrid and multi-cloud data management capabilities, Henschen said.

"The Data Hub, in particular, facilitates hybrid and multi-cloud data access without data movement and copying," he said. "This is crucial in harnessing data from any source, no matter where it may be running, to facilitate data-driven decisioning."

At SAP Sapphire Now 2018, several vendors unveiled new tools -- or updates to existing ones -- that address some of the challenges associated with moving SAP systems to the intelligent enterprise landscape.

• Tricentis Tosca's continuous testing method is designed to keep pace with modern SAP environments, unlike traditional testing methods, which were built for previous versions of SAP applications. These legacy testing systems may not always adequately support S/4HANA and Fiori 2.0, so many SAP users have to use manual testing to validate releases, according to Tricentis. Cloud-enabled Tricentis Tosca 11.2 now supports a variety of the newest SAP versions, including S/4HANA and Fiori 2.0.

• Worksoft announced the release of Worksoft Interactive Capture 2.0, which is test automation software for SAP environments. Worksoft Interactive Capture 2.0 operates on the principle that it's critical to keep existing SAP applications operating as new systems and applications are being developed. Worksoft Interactive Capture 2.0 allows business users and application functional experts to create automated business workflows, test documentation and test cases.

• Virtual Forge announced its CodeProfiler for HANA can now scan the SAPUI5 programming language. CodeProfiler for HANA provides detailed information on code quality as a programmer writes code, similar to spell check on a word processor, according to Virtual Forge. This allows coders to identify and manage performance, security and compliance deficiencies early in the HANA application development process. Reducing or eliminating performance decline and application downtime is particularly critical, as HANA enables real-time business applications.

• As more organizations move their SAP environments to S/4HANA -- or plan to -- it becomes important to understand how users actually interact with SAP applications. Knoa Software showed a new version of its user experience management application, Knoa UEM for Enterprise Applications -- it's also resold by SAP as SAP User Experience Management by Knoa. The product allows organizations to view and analyze how users are interacting with SAP applications, including activities that lead to errors, never-used applications and workarounds that are needed because an application's software is bad, according to Knoa. The latest version of Knoa UEM for Enterprise Applications allows companies that are migrating to S/4HANA to analyze usage on a range of SAP applications, including SAP Fiori, SAP Business Client, SAP Enterprise Portal and SAP GUI for Windows. It can also be used for SAP Leonardo application development by determining how customers actually use the applications and developing a business case for the application based on accurate measurements of user experience improvements in the new apps.

• General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) compliance is a huge issue now, and Attunity released Gold Client for Data Protection, a data governance application for SAP environments. Gold Client for Data Protection enables the identification and masking of personally identifiable information across production SAP ECC systems, according to Attunity. The software helps organizations to find PII across SAP systems, which then enables them to enforce GDPR's "right to be forgotten" mandate.