Why is Tricentis the go-to testing platform for SAP testing? Simple as 1-2-3

They say a picture is worth a thousand words (in German, “Ein Bild sagt mehr als tausend Worte”). In case you haven’t already heard about the partnership between SAP and Tricentis – making Tricentis the go-to platform for SAP testing – I think the following image from the SAP ALM Summit keynote sums it up quite nicely:

But…since this is such a rich topic, I do believe that there’s more to be said about why and how we’re working together to a lead new era of SAP testing.

Why join forces with SAP?

Now that digital transformation has become a do-or-die proposition for most organizations, SAP has become much more than an ERP system. The SAP digital core is the central nervous system for the “intelligent enterprise” and taking full advantage of digital transformation opportunities involves migrating to S/4HANA and moving SAP workloads to the cloud.

This is a seismic shift. It promises to yield immense benefits, but a significant amount of change is required, especially for organizations with a lot of custom code and integrations. And while a migration project might have a discrete completion date, the change never stops. SAP will continue to unleash new innovations at an unprecedented pace – on their schedule, not yours.

Traditional testing methods (a combination of burdening key users to perform manual testing + post-release “hypercare” periods) don’t cut it here. They’re not comprehensive and accurate enough to test massive shifts, like S/4HANA migrations, and they’re just too slow for the new pace of innovation. In the days of on-prem implementations, customers who couldn’t test updates fast enough could always defer updates as needed (and fall further and further behind). That’s not an option now that updates are rolled out automatically. For S/4HANA Cloud, updates are issued on a quarterly basis with a narrow window for testing before the changes go live.

SAP recognized that a new approach to testing would be vital for helping its customers 1) reduce the time and risk of adopting modern platforms such as S/4HANA and cloud-based offerings such as SAP SuccessFactors and SAP Ariba, and 2) keep up with the accelerated pace of updates that will be the new normal. They sought out a strong partner who had a proven record of success helping enterprises accelerate testing across and beyond SAP – and the strongest partner they found was Tricentis.

As Marc Thier, SVP of Application Lifecycle Management at SAP, put it: “This partnership agreement is unprecedented in the ALM space – it’s a once-in-a-decade announcement. Together, we will help ensure that the adoption of SAP software is accelerated, customers get the most out of their SAP solutions, and costs for continuous testing of cloud and hybrid landscapes are significantly reduced.”

Tricentis and SAP development teams will be closely collaborating to ensure that we offer unmatched support for testing SAP innovations as they’re released. Expect seamless integrations, easier testing, and more powerful automation across extended SAP capabilities.

3 core benefits of Tricentis SAP testing

More than 400 SAP customers around the world are already using the Tricentis platform to accelerate their SAP initiatives. These include some of the biggest SAP shops in the world, spanning a variety of industries: financial services, manufacturing, energy/utilities, retail, and more. We’ve helped them achieve the following 3 core benefits:

• 10x faster testing speeds. Our customers are making weekly (even daily) releases a reality, turbocharging their SAP innovation.
• 90% risk reduction. We’re helping enterprises keep their business running during their SAP transformations, minimizing disruption and eliminating the need for hypercare.
• 50% cost savings. Customers are seeing testing costs shrink by 50% or more; for large enterprises this results in millions of dollars saved per year.

3 questions to answer for each SAP release

How do we achieve these 3 core benefits? By answering the 3 core questions you need to ask with each release or update MUCH faster, more accurately, and more cost-effectively than you ever could with traditional testing methods (manual testing by key users + hypercare)…

Question 1: What do I need to test?

Tricentis LiveCompare analyzes your SAP systems and how they are used in production to become the go-to expert on your SAP landscape. Through AI-powered change impact analysis, it can pinpoint the risks in any change to your SAP system, identifying exactly what to test. This way, you don’t waste valuable time and resources testing things that didn’t change – and frankly don’t matter: On average, customers using Tricentis LiveCompare achieve an 85% reduction in the number of tests to run.

Question 2: Does it work?

Tricentis Tosca automates end-to-end regression testing across SAP and non-SAP systems. Once LiveCompare identifies what to test, it tells Tosca which tests to run to ensure a zero-defect release. This makes your testing 10x faster while confirming your business processes will work after the changes are deployed to production.

Question 3: Does it scale?

Tricentis Flood provides on-demand load testing for all browser-based SAP applications. This tells you whether updated apps will scale or grind to a halt when too many people try to use them. In addition to supporting traditional load testing approaches (testing at the protocol level), we also enable you to test at the browser-level, which is a much faster, simpler and more resilient way to assess a realistic user experience at scale.