SAP Solution Manager 7.2

Overview

SAP Solution Manager 7.2 (SolMan) is SAP's on-premise application-lifecycle-management platform, and for most Business Suite customers it is the control tower running alongside the ERP — covering implementation and process documentation, change request management (ChaRM), IT service management, the test suite, custom-code and landscape management, and technical monitoring. It is deeply woven into how many SAP teams operate day to day, which is what makes its end-of-maintenance more consequential than it first appears.

It became generally available on 15 August 2016. SAP mainstream maintenance runs until 31 December 2027 — the date from which SAP ceases routine corrections, security notes and legal/regulatory updates for the release. For customers who opt in, a paid extended-maintenance phase then carries support to 31 December 2030, after which only customer-specific maintenance remains available. That leaves a workable but finite window; given that SAP transformations routinely run multi-year, scoping and budgeting should be underway rather than deferred.

The successor is SAP Cloud ALM, SAP's cloud-native ALM offering, complemented by SAP Focused Run for advanced, high-scale monitoring. Because there is no SolMan 8, the move is a phased adoption of cloud ALM capabilities rather than an in-place upgrade: teams map the SolMan scenarios they actually depend on to their Cloud ALM (or Focused Run) equivalents and transition them deliberately.

Basis, ALM and IT-operations teams should note two things in particular. First, SolMan 7.2's mainstream date aligns with Business Suite 7. Second, its extended-maintenance phase covers only selected functionality rather than the whole product, so anyone relying on a scenario outside that scope needs to plan its Cloud ALM replacement against the earlier mainstream date, not the later extended one.