Panaya Getting It Right

I usually don’t use this space to pimp products, but in this case I have to make an exception. First of all because it is a good story and secondly because it is a great product.

First time I heard about Panaya was at last year’s Demo Jam at SAP TechEd Berlin. We were competitors, which of course made me not like them very much. I remember they had a good product and a good story, we of course had a better product, but not a great story (as well as technical difficulties). We didn’t win.
Since then the name Panaya kept showing up repeatedly, on all channels. In the beginning I only found it annoying because they were still competitors right? But many around me seemed to like them, so at one point they started growing on me instead. Not through annoying ads or unwanted newsletters, but through joining the conversation and through providing the community with (free, really no strings attached) valuable content. The latest being “The Big Book of SAP Upgrades“, where they asked hundreds of SIs for their best upgrade tips and lessons, which then was released as an e-book. Free copy of course.
Finally after seeing a demo of their SAP Upgrade Automation product I was sold.

The product is for release upgrades and support packages and in three short sentences this is what Panaya does:
- Reads your custom SAP code and configuration
- Builds a complete model of your SAP system
- Fully simulates the impact of every system change
The advantage for you by doing that is having a system which will tell you exactly what will not work, how to fix it, it will fix it for you where possible and finally tell you how to test efficiently.

The product itself is cloud based, so you access it through a website. It has three main sections “Overview”, “Planning” and “Realization & Go Live”, each section being fully self explanatory. There is no need for long tutorials or time wasted doing courses.

The Dashboard gives you an overview over the analysis, and from here you can drill down to different layers of your system like transactions, support packages, user exits, roles, reports or even 3rd party components. As a developer what I really liked is the screen which shows the difference between SAP standard code and your own custom code.

The “Planning” and “Realization & Go Live” sections will help you better plan and perform your upgrade project, for instance by giving you an overview over which tasks needs to be performed (sorted in high, medium and low priority), progress highlights and task status. It even comes with a project planning tool.



I won’t be showing every aspect of the product here, if you work with upgrades I highly recommend you schedule a demo or request a trial instead. (a trial will only set you back 20-30 minutes)

It is not often companies grows on me like Panaya has over the last year, hope more companies will look and learn, especially in terms of mastering social media. Congrats on a job well done so far!

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