Six SAP commitments. Ten years. What Nordic customers can actually do now.
On 9 July, the European Commission made six SAP commitments legally binding for ten years, worldwide, under independent trustee supervision. It is a commitments decision, not a guilty verdict, but the commitments themselves are hard law.
For Nordic SAP customers, four things changed. You can now split your landscape and choose support per part, SAP, third party, or none. You can terminate unused licenses and their maintenance in defined circumstances. Reinstatement fees are abolished, and back-maintenance charges are lowered. New purchases no longer restart your lock-in clock.
The gray areas are where the real work sits. Which termination circumstances your licenses actually qualify for. Where the boundary of a "part" of your landscape runs when you want to split support. What happens to bundled discounts when you start pulling components out. SAP's account team will resolve every ambiguity in SAP's favor, that is their job. The customers who win their next renewal will walk in with a mapped estate, every license, its usage, its contractual basis, and a defensible position on what the commitments now permit.
The prize is not a discount at renewal. It is a reshuffle: take out what no longer earns its place in the SAP stack, keep the core where SAP is genuinely best, and redirect freed-up spend to modern integration, agent-ready data, and agentic
AI. Every SAP customer in the Nordics has more leverage today than in June.
Few have mapped it. Fewer have used it.
Article by Sveinung Gehrken, CEO, S5 Consulting
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Has your SAP estate become leverage, or is it still just invoices you cannot question?