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Former Member

Cloud and Big Data are the two essential imperatives of our time in the IT industry. SAP has been at the forefront of these trends, expanding its offerings into the Cloud, and has recently announced SAP S/4HANA, a quantum leap in business value from a native SAP HANA based Business Suite.

But what does this mean for the long time on-premise installed base customers? And what value does SAP deliver to these customers in the future?

The answer lies in SAP maintenance and support offerings. These include two powerful sources of value for SAP customers.

There is an innovation commitment driving investment protection. SAP has recently expanded its mainstream maintenance period for existing SAP Business Suite 7 applications until 2025, one of the longest time any IT company has ever committed continued innovation delivery for its customers. Customers can decide on their individual adoption choices and paths for both cloud and SAP S/4HANA with 10 years of time from today. After that timeframe, SAP of course remains committed to customers needs.

Furthermore, it is a value realization commitment for all SAP solutions – installed ones, like SAP Business Suite 7, as well as new ones, like SAP S/4HANA. Some people in the market see support only as bug fixing plus issue resolution and provision of updates or legal patches. SAP has long left this constricted
perception. There are five key areas where SAP delivers high value to customers through support:

  1. Mission Critical Support. Many providers talk about response times, SAP guarantees corrective action proposals in Enterprise Support. And SAP includes a powerful Application Lifecycle Management platform, SAP Solution Manager, in support.
  2. Empowerment and Collaboration. SAP continuously invests in powerful approaches to let customers capture the value from Support, such as the Enterprise Support Academy with numerous value adding assets, or personalized Support Advisory.
  3. Seamless Support in hybrid landscapes, including SAP Business Suite but also e.g. SuccessFactors or Ariba solutions. The SAP ONE Support program provides a seamless end-to-end support experience going way beyond managing technical interfaces – e.g., by providing end-to-end lifecycle management and business process monitoring. The program is included in existing support offerings. And, SAP doesn’t stop at SAP landscape boundaries: Third Party products, to the extent possible by IP regulations, are also monitored and managed by SAP Enterprise Support.
  4. Business Outcome. SAP never stops helping customers expand the business value from using SAP solutions, based on support services, e.g. in SAP Enterprise Support by providing customers with business performance benchmarks and best practices.
  5. Choice. SAP customers continue to have the choice between a lower price baseline offering and Enterprise Support, SAPs value added proactive mission critical and business outcome oriented support offering. Plus advanced services on top at choice of customers (e.g., SAP MaxAttention). Adoption rates show that the vast majority of customer choose – and stay on – SAP Enterprise Support, proving the real game in support is about business value, not commodity and lowest price.

These are just a few examples showing that the story of Maintenance and Support at SAP is a story of continuous innovation to expand the value customers receive.

On top, SAP is one of the leaders in the industry with ways on how customers can reallocate existing support and maintenance spendings switching to new solutions, be it in the cloud or on-premise. This way, customers receive additional commercial flexibility to transform their IT landscapes – at their
own choice and pace.

 

SAP Enterprise Support prices have been stable since 2009, and will remain stable until 2025. This is unparalleled in the industry.

SAP will continue to follow this path of both providing innovation for installed base SAP solutions, and through advanced support services driving recurring business value realization from using SAP Software.

I encourage customers to re-assess the value of SAP Support with us – we are happy to provide advice on how to best leverage the value from our Support offerings. I am sure there are untapped opportunities to detect – covered by Maintenance and Support!SAP

You can find further information about support and maintenance on www.sapsupport.info or  via the SAP Support Portal: www.support.sap.com 

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