Packaged Applications like SAP, Salesforce, and Workday are mission critical applications that most of the world's enterprises run on. 91% of the Global 2000 run on SAP alone.
Though these applications are mission critical, we speak to customers all the time who aren't testing their SAP instance at all. The excuses abound from lack of time and insufficient skills to reduction in IT budgets and head counts. Regardless of the reason, many teams need to give SAP Load Testing the higher priority it deserves.
Top 5 Reasons SAP Load Testing is Overlooked
In our experience, there are countless reasons why SAP Load Testing is essential to business success. The 5 most important reasons we hear customers mention specifically are:
- The cost of downtime is too high to risk: when all sales orders and transactions travel through SAP, the business is at risk of being at a complete standstill if SAP goes offline or slows down to a halt. Calculating your own downtime is critical to understanding and communicating the risk that is inherent to skipping your load and performance testing. Some organizations will find that even one hour of SAP downtime can cost them millions of dollars, especially during busy holiday or month end periods where traffic on these apps is increased.
- The rate of change is increasing: while Agile has been the norm in many non-packaged app software development teams, adoption for Agile on SAP has been slower. However, teams are now focusing much more closely on moving their packaged application teams to Agile as well. As the rate of change in these applications increases, the need for repeatable and reliable testing increases exponentially.
- The tools are making testing easier and cheaper: newer open-sourced testing tools on the market such as JMeter and Element are making load testing something that more and more team members can accomplish. These free tools allow you to reduce your load testing tooling costs to allow them to be more ubiquitous and reduce the barrier to entry.
- S/4 Hana and Fiori are changing the game: SAP announced that they will be bringing their traditional infrastructure to end of life by 2025, which has sent many teams into a frenzy to figure out their migration strategy. The migration of your instance to S/4 Hana and Fiori will require multiple changes to hosting and infrastructure considerations. Each of these changes needs to be closely monitored to ensure that performance is consistent and that the application will be able to handle periods of peak load.
- Application Interconnectedness increases complexity of SAP: the adoption of cloud has lowered the effort to implement a new packaged application. Where companies use to adopt a full solution for end-to-end business management from SAP, they are now adopting a best of breed solution with multiple cloud solutions from disparate vendors being chained together into a single platform. This dramatically increases the complexity as the performance of this end-to-end chain is only as strong as the performance of any single link in the business process. So, it is imperative to make sure SAP as well as all of these interconnected apps are frequently tested and measured for even the slightest performance regression.
Load Testing SAP Should Be Your Top Priority
Though there are many reasons why companies do not do SAP Load Testing, there is no excuse for not getting a regular check that the most critical app in your business is running smoothly. The incurred cost of not load testing SAP can be dramatic.
Teams looking to get started with SAP Load Testing can explore Flood, which allows for easy to use cloud load testing with AWS and Azure which can meet the needs of your fast moving enterprise. Check out a free trial of Flood today or send us a question if you'd like to know more about how you can get started.