SAP Support – options

Following the announcements last week that SAP will be offering a tiered approach to SAP Support, customers now have until 15th March to make a decision about whether to stay with Enterprise Support or move to Standard Support. The decision about which of the products should be contracted from SAP is an important one to a business and should not be taken without reviewing fully the implications. For example if you move to Standard Support and then want to move back to Enterprise you will automatically have to pay the full 22% licence fee going forward.

Key points to consider when making your decision

1) Which version of SAP are you running across your enterprise?

2) Can you get value from the additional tools and services made available to you? For example:

• Solution Manager – Enterprise Edition
• Root Cause Analysis from SAP Support back office
• SLA for Severity 1 and 2 messages

3) Maturity and capability of the internal support organisation

Enhanced maintenance

If you are considering making the decision solely around the total cost of the maintenance fee remember that if you stay with Enterprise Support you will not have to pay the additional extended maintenance fees of either 2% or 4% for versions older than SAP 6.0.
(E.g. SAP R3 4.6C +4% in 2010, SAP Enterprise 4.7 +2% until the end of March 2010 and then +4% until the end of the year and SAP ECC 5.0 (mySAP 2004) + 2% from April).

Price inflation

From 2012 for the first time SAP will potentially be applying a CPI increase to maintenance, initially this will only apply to Standard Support. A decision will be made centrally by SAP whether to apply the CPI increase although the actual rate will be defined locally. (Customers will be charged the CPI defined increase of the country holding their licence agreement.) There will not be a CPI increase for Enterprise Support until 2017 at the earliest.

Changing support version

It is possible to switch from Enterprise Support to Standard Support once a year on 1st January provided notice was given before the 30th September. Customers can switch to Enterprise Support at anytime with no more than 90 days notice however after March of this year making that change will result in automatically moving straight to 22%!

New licences

If you are in the process of procuring additional licences from SAP or are planning to do so in the future it is important to understand that if you are an Enterprise Support User the annual maintenance fee will immediately be 22% for the new licences. If you have opted for Standard Support then any new licences purchased will be charged at the base rate of 18% (plus CPI).