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SAP customers fancy licence payments 'holiday'
No staff = no users = no usage
SAP customers are finding it increasingly difficult to keep up with the German giant’s software charges and want a payments “holiday”.
A UK and Ireland SAP User Group poll found 95 per cent think the rules on SAP's licensing are out of control, with 67 per cent blaming SAP’s expanding product line.
As the catalogue of software has increased, it has become harder to track licence use, particularly on modules that are installed automatically, users said.
Almost all of those surveyed – 97 per cent – want SAP to allow them to “park” unused licences to account for cases where the software is no longer used because of layoffs or corporate restructuring.
Eighty-eight per cent called on SAP to make its price list public. Oracle SAP's big rival in ERP, does this already.
SAP’s pricing seems to also prohibit greater rollouts by customers trying to expand their operations: 77 per cent said the entry point for deploying extra modules or functionality to their core SAP systems is too high.
Customers also want a more web-friendly pricing regime: 78 per cent say SAP should introduce concurrent user pricing to permit external use of the software or data by external users – employees, partners or customers.
Philip Adams, vice chairman of the UK & Ireland SAP User Group, said SAP customers would like to see transparent and flexible licence costs and conditions.
Adams' group surveyed 336 SAP users in 150 user organisations ahead of the User Group conference next month in Manchester. ®