Amazon Meet SAP - SAP Meet Amazon!

Only the biggest companies with the biggest IT budgets use SAP and they use it to run their businesses, both internal and customer facing. SAP supports a wide range of client protocols, from HTML to Flex to Adobe Interactive Forms, but the core UI is still the venerable SAPGUI for Windows, now at version 7.10. Until now, CapCal has only supported HTML and Flex, but going into beta this week is CapCal for SAPGUI, which of course means CapCal for SAPGUI on the Amazon Cloud (another first in case anyone is counting).

Many SAP customers have thousands of employees and hundreds of thousands if not millions of customers themselves. So let's say a company has 30,000 employees and all of them have access to one or more SAP applications (HR, sales orders, invoices, inventory, etc). How do they know when they implement a new patch or upgrade that their performance or scalability won't be impacted?

They don't, really, except for running relatively small load tests in the lab with a tool like HP LoadRunner. Ask HP what it would cost to do a single 30,000 user load test with the SAP protocol and let me know what they say, will you?

If the answer is less than $100,000 I will be very surprised, plus the number of computers that the LoadRunner agent would have to be installed on would be somewhere between 200 and 300. So just the prep work and setup could take a week or two if not more. As far as I know, nothing above 2,000 simultaneous users has ever been done - someone correct me if I'm wrong! That in itself could take dozens of computers at least.

With CapCal for SAPGUI, just record a session in the GUI and press the Run button - whether the test runs on the local machine, on other machines in the network, or on the Amazon Cloud it will begin executing within seconds. How many agents are needed is a function of the total number of virtual users required divided by the maximum number of SAP sessions allowed per machine, usually about 100. So 30,000 users would require 300 agents, which will spawn automatically for the duration of the test and terminate at the end.

The CapCal Blog now has a sister edition on the SAP Developer Network and we'll be posting the links here on the main blog as well. So please check back for the latest on CapCal Cloudburst for SAP!