SAP Starts 2010 with Customer-Friendly Move

As announced on Thursday, January 14, 2010, SAP offers customers to choose between two maintenance support options: they can switch from Standard Support to Enterprise Support and vice versa. This is new and kind of a small revolution. Up till now, SAP has insisted that Enterprise Support is the only available maintenance support option, regardless of the current structure of the customer’s SAP environment.

The Standard Support fee is 18% in 2010, with the right to raise this fee for inflation on an annual basis, starting 2011. For Enterprise Support, SAP charges 18.36% this year. Fees develop according to SAP’s Enterprise Support ramp-up reference curve.

Good News ...

First, companies that today are not able to leverage the support features of Enterprise Support due to their SAP environment can switch to Standard Support. If their situation changes, they are free to move to Enterprise Support later on.

Second, the new terms apply for all SAP customers.

SAP keeps the patterns for raising maintenance fees as they were before, meaning that Enterprise Support fees (now at 18.36%) will climb in steps up to 22% in 2016 (also referred to as ‘SAP Enterprise Support ramp-up reference curve’).

... But Room for Improvement

PAC rates SAP’s move positive, but it still leaves room for improvement:

• + Companies have to decide whether to choose Standard or Enterprise Support for their whole SAP environment. However, some companies run a mix of old and new SAP product releases.
• + There are still no options within Enterprise Support, allowing users to choose the amount of service they need (kinds of “Enterprise Support Bronze”, “Silver” or “Gold”).
• + SAP users in Germany and Austria of which many are still on Standard Support can move to Enterprise Support at a fee of 18.36%, if they do so by March 15, 2010 (with fees raised in the following years as mentioned above). After that date, a switch to Enterprise Support comes at a fee of 22% - these customers only have little time left to review their maintenance strategy.