General Licensing Question

[Former Member]

I know the obvious answer is 'talk to SAP representative' and we are trying to line this up, but I thought I would ask the forum for real life examples. We run IDM using HCM as the source of truth and provision to many other SAP systems (both in productive and non productive instances). My understanding is this licensing is included as part of our SAP Netweaver licensing.

Now we want to look at provisioning to AD, Exchange and possible unix/linux systems. HCM will still be the source of truth so I am not looking for provisioning lots of non sap users into AD.

What is the licensing structure for non sap systems ? If I just use the AD create/change user job does that require a license ? Are there levels of license based on the number of users or number of non SAP systems to provision to ?

Just trying to get the facts straight in my head *before* the sales guys turn up !

thanks

[Former Member]

We had same set of question and SAP responded with same answers. Any SAP product (Portal, eSourcing, MDM etc) that is using AD for authentication and if you want to provision users in AD using IdM, it is still considered "Third Party" and you have to pay the per user license fee. Number of license is counted based on total no. of identities in IdM. So even if you are provisioning just one id in AD, you still have to pay for all the identities that are in IdM

Edited by: Anurag Sharma on May 4, 2011 11:41 PM

[Former Member]

As explained to me "If you are using IDM to manage AD users then you need a license".

If in any doubt, best to get confirmation on your case from you SAP rep.

[Former Member]

Spoke with SAP. Basic rules are ;

• If you use IDM to manage users in any non sap area such as AD or Unix, you need to buy the extra license (which is a per named user type license).

• Any provisioning to SAP systems does not require any license cost since it is included as part of the original IDM package.

• Regardless of the method you use to talk to these non-sap systems (eg Global provisioning framework task versus exporting an ASCII text file and using external tools to provision), you still require the license.

• Licensing only applied to production systems. I can manage dev/test users on non-sap systems without any licensing issues .

Cost per user was discussed, and lets just say that for the recommended cost per user and the number of users we have, I can employ a person just to sit there and manually do the provisioning. But thats not quite as automated and immediate !

Hope this helps understand licensing.

[Former Member]

Hi Phill / Matt,

I am back after a long break and found this intresting thread !

How about if my AD is connected to SAP Enterprise Portal ( SAP EP) ?

In this use case SAP EP is using a few AD domains as it's user store so technically all the users in these domains are SAP users and should have been covered under the EP licensing or would we still need to buy separate one's for these ?

Regards,

Shailesh

[former_member2987]

Phil,

Obviously not a SAP representative, but the last I heard there was a "per identity" charge for connections outside of SAP, which is somewhat foolish in my opinion, but obviously it's not my call.

I don't know if it's the same charge per application or if there are different charges for Directory Services, database apps, etc.

There's obviously no technical issue with IDM attaching to different systems. It's superbly designed for that.

Please let us know what you find out!

Matt