Following a European Commission investigation, SAP has globally updated its maintenance and support policies to introduce more flexibility for customers.
Einar Brown Berg, Nortura, represents the SBN Merkantil Forum and is part of the Global License team in SUGEN, along with Roy Halvorsen from Orkla. Einar hereby informs the SBN members about the changes.
Financial Updates
- Reinstatement fees are completely abolished.
- Back-maintenance charges are capped at the lower of six months or 50% of the unsupported period, and waived entirely for end-of-life products.
- Single-metric contracts will now include downward adjustments, allowing maintenance fees to decrease if the underlying metric (like customer revenue) decreases.
Licensing and Terminations
- Shelfware: Partial termination of unused licenses without rediscounting is now permitted under specific conditions:
- Workforce reduction of more than 10% over two years (allows up to a 10% license reduction).
- Products reaching end-of-life or customer-specific maintenance.
- Divestitures or bankruptcy/insolvency.
Support Structure Flexibility
- Landscape Splits: While tightly integrated systems must remain under a single support model, customers can now separate loosely integrated solutions (e.g., SAP ERP and BusinessObjects) into distinct commercial installations. This allows different support models, including third-party providers, for separate landscapes.
- Initial Support Term: The mandatory one-year minimum support term will now only apply once per customer lifetime and will not reset with subsequent purchases.
Deadlines and Implementation
- Initiation: Customers must route requests through their SAP sales representative to be tracked in a central SAP ticketing system.
- Deadlines: Full maintenance termination still requires notice by September 30 to take effect on January 1. Landscape splits, however, operate on a different timeline: SAP has up to six months to assess the split, with resulting support terminations taking effect on the first day of the following quarter.
Oppsummeringen ovenfor er utarbeidet på grunnlag av et møtereferat fra en diskusjon om SAPs forpliktelser knyttet til vedlikehold og support. Uwe Grigoleit, som er ansvarlig for SAPs «Customer Evolution Program» og porteføljen for SAP-tjenester og -support, presenterte for SAP-brukergruppene de forpliktelsene SAP påtok seg i kjølvannet av EU-kommisjonens undersøkelse av selskapets retningslinjer for vedlikehold og support.
Europakommisjonen innledet formelt undersøkelsen i september 2025. SAP avsluttet drøftingene med Kommisjonen 10. juli 2026, noe som resulterte i en rekke tilsagn ment å imøtekomme Kommisjonens bekymringer knyttet til konkurranseforhold.