Update on our work with SAP regarding Indirect Usage

We know the issue of licensing and indirect access continues to be an area of concern for many of our members, therefore we'd like to take the opportunity to provide you with a short update on the work we have been doing as part of the SUGEN Licensing Charter team.

For the last 18 months, we have been working on behalf of our members to ensure there is greater clarity and transparency regarding indirect access and license auditing.

Firstly, we welcomed SAP's announcement at SAPPHIRE last year, regarding moving to a business-metric based model for certain scenarios (Order-to-Cash, Procure-to-Pay, Indirect Static Read). Since then, we have been providing regular feedback on where improvements need to be made, and highlighted the areas where there still needs to be further clarity. In addition, we have driven the creation of the SAP Licensing Transparency Center, which provides our members with a mechanism to submit anonymised use cases or scenarios, and get feedback from SAP on how the case should be licensed.

We will continue to work with SAP to not only provide further clarity around the business metric pricing model for the 3 scenarios, but to also drive the development of a broader licencing model which incorporates indirect access across any scenario that is understandable, predictable, transparent, consistent and fair. We are also continuing to highlight that customers who have utilised SAP believing they are correctly licensed will not be happy if they are asked to pay more to SAP now or when moving to the new license model, if their business scope has not changed in the previous years.

By continuing to work closely with SAP regarding the topic of indirect, we are hopeful of providing a further update on progress in the next couple of months.

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