At SAP, our mission has always been to help the world run better and improve people’s lives. Thousands of organizations worldwide rely on SAP’s enterprise resource planning (ERP) and other software to manage their most critical business operations—from corporate finance and human resources to supply chain management and project delivery.
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Equally important to our customers are the on-premise maintenance and support practices that help safeguard the software’s ongoing performance and resilience, with regular updates and technical assistance that support business continuity.
As we continue to innovate across our portfolio, we also continue our efforts to let our commercial practices reflect the flexibility and transparency our customers need, and on engaging constructively with regulators around the world.
In a constructive dialogue with the European Commission, SAP has now agreed to a set of adaptations to these practices that will further improve this flexibility, transparency, and predictability. These measures reflect our broad commitment to continuously evolving our practices to serve customers better as their businesses and technology landscapes change.
Our updated policies will apply to all current and future SAP customers worldwide for all of SAP’s on-premise products. Taken together, they represent one of the most customer-friendly maintenance and support approaches in the business software industry, and they set a leading example of what customers can expect from SAP. This further flexibility will not come at cost of business continuity, reliability, and scale, of course.
Specifically, SAP is committed to the following adaptations:
Greater choice in maintenance and support
SAP understands that customers that run SAP on-premise software want the choice and flexibility to tailor their maintenance arrangements to match the way their business operates. In response, SAP is further enhancing how customers can organize their SAP system landscape by providing a clear, streamlined framework for splitting it into separate parts, known as commercial installations, for which customers can select different levels of SAP support, elect no support at all ,or make other choices outside of SAP Support for that particular installation. This gives organizations even greater ability to tailor their on-premise support arrangements across different parts of their SAP environment in a way that best fits their operational and commercial priorities, allowing them to scope their maintenance and support strategy to match their strategic positioning and unique business outlook.
Providing more flexibility on unused licenses
SAP already offers attractive programs to leverage unused licenses by reallocating on-premise licenses to cloud subscriptions, to other on-premise licenses, or simply to terminate them.
With additional commitments, SAP is offering even more flexibility to help customers terminate licenses, in objectively justified cases. This concerns severe workforce reductions, software products in customer specific maintenance, bankruptcy, divestiture, and implementation failure cases.
SAP is also expanding access to single-metric contracts, which provide an alternative and often simpler way of calculating license fees on which maintenance and support fees are based. Broader availability of these contracts will give customers an even more transparent and predictable basis for managing their ongoing costs. The maintenance and support fees for the single metric contract are scaling with the single metric, which allows better adjustment to changing business conditions.
Simpler contract terms and policies
Clarity in contractual terms and policies is essential for customers making long-term technology decisions. As part of these commitments, SAP will further clarify some of its key contractual provisions and applicable policies. This provides even greater predictability, ensuring that customers can plan their support obligations with full confidence as they expand their SAP deployments.
Easier terms for returning customers
When a customer returns to SAP maintenance and support, it benefits from the innovation and corrections that were deployed during that time. Our commitments introduce meaningful improvements to the terms for customers that resume SAP maintenance and support after a period of absence.
SAP will not charge any administrative fees for customers coming back and limit the back-maintenance fee to the minimum of six months or 50% of the fees for the time off. In addition, a defined set of outdated products will not trigger any back-maintenance at all. These improvements provide further confidence that returning to SAP maintenance and support will be straightforward and cost-effective.
All these commitments were developed in a close and constructive discussion with the European Commission, but also with SAP’s customer representatives, like the German-Speaking User Group (DSAG).
“From the perspective of DSAG member companies, this is an important step in the right direction. The provided flexibility will help more customers to make the right decisions regarding their SAP system architecture. Even with SAP’s cloud-based strategy, it is important to decide on your own how to proceed with systems that still have a positive impact on the company and there’s no need to shut them down,” said Jens Hungershausen, Chairman of the Executive Board of DSAG. “We see this development as the result of our effort to drive an ongoing dialogue and partnership between SAP and the customer community on such improvements. These commitments will deliver tangible benefits for customers and strengthen trust while keeping customer choice and flexibility at the center.”
Our teams are ready to help
To support a seamless experience for every customer, SAP account executives and customer-facing teams will be fully briefed on all the changes outlined above. They are equipped to walk customers through the details, answer questions, and apply these commitments in a fair, transparent, and predictable way. Whether a customer is looking to restructure their system landscape, explore single-metric contracts, terminate unused licences, or understand the improved terms for returning to SAP support, SAP teams stand ready to guide them through every step of the process. There will be a clearing structure set up by SAP in case a customer may contend the application of these new rules.
Looking ahead
At SAP, we are committed to empowering organizations with the enterprise software and services they need to thrive as they modernize toward an AI-enabled autonomous enterprise at their own pace. We champion customer choice and continuously work to maintain an open, vibrant ecosystem for our partners and customers alike. These commitments are the product of constructive and collaborative engagement with the European Commission, and they are designed to deliver real, meaningful benefits to our global customer base.
As noted above, these commitments relate to our on-premises maintenance and support services. Our cloud offerings continue to evolve through ongoing innovation in areas like SAP S/4HANA Cloud, RISE with SAP, and our broader cloud portfolio and are unaffected by these changes. However, the added clarity and flexibility support customers as they modernize toward an AI-enabled autonomous enterprise at their own pace
We believe these commitments establish a new benchmark for customer-friendly practices in the enterprise software industry.
For full details on the commitments, including the conditions for their application, please visit here.
The full text of the commitments as adopted by the European Commission is also available on the Commission’s competition website under case number AT.40823.
We look forward to continuing to support the success of our customers’ businesses in the future!
Stefan Steinle is executive vice president and head of Global Customer Support at SAP.
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