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SAPDigitalAccess
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SAPLicensing
It’s the beginning of 2022, you’re just breathing a sigh of relief because the annual financial statements are through. The finances are settled, the balance sheets are clear and you can slowly get back to your daily business.
But then comes an email that changes everything….
“Your indirect use has not been licensed yet. Please give us a proposed date when we can address this issue. To our knowledge, you have solution X, non-SAP technology Y and a time confirmation system Z in use in your company. In the last measurement, no results were visible from Passport. Therefore, it seems that this measurement tool has not been installed yet. For this reason, we would like to exchange ideas with you to solve open questions.”
Yes, admittedly, this text is completely made up and will certainly read differently in reality. But the facts remain the same. So far, more than 50% of companies using SAP do not have any contracts for indirect use with SAP, and in 2022, many of them will be bitter for not having reacted in time. Since 2019, SAP has been offering a very interesting license proposal to be on the safe side and really save money. The offer is called DAAP (Digital Access Adoption Program) and offers a 90% discount if you accept SAP’s definition of Digital Access and its licensing.
Right now, the understandable attitude of most companies is: If it’s voluntary, well, we don’t have to participate and voluntarily pay more too!
An expensive mistake!
What many don’t have in mind is that the voluntary status ends at the beginning of 2022, and then SAP will be at your door and will want to “discuss” this problem with you.
Your future forecast will most likely be similar to this below:
Now we negotiate at the list price. If you do not want to accept licensing by document, you will be confronted with every indirect contact between SAP systems and third-party systems without an old contract for indirect use. It doesn’t matter if it concerns created documents, data changes, read operations or deletions. In that case, everything is on the negotiating table, but with an uncertain outcome.
Even if there is a legacy contract, it remains to be seen whether it will cover all the aspects that are then also newly found.
Last but not least, back-maintenance becomes an issue. Here it is important to know whether the company will have to pay maintenance fees for the last few years, since it can be proven that the negotiated processes were also used without payment over the last few years.
The result will be a sum X that has to be paid now and in the following years.
There is an alternative. Here is a counter scenario of how you can also respond and possibly license the indirect use without spending a dime, and still establish compliance.
DAAP has three interesting offerings that are sure to be called in by SAP in 2022. It defines 9 document types that, if triggered by non-SAP technology and created in SAP, will be chargeable.
If you accept this definition until the end of 2021, you will get a 90% discount, you will be exempt from possible back-maintenance and you can pay with surplus named-user licenses. All other indirect activities are thus no longer chargeable.
The catch is that you have to know what you are buying and what you have too much of from your current SAP usage. The SAP LAW does not optimize your user licensing and if the SAP Passport program is already installed, automatic document counts of the 9 documents created in SAP systems are possible. However, erroneous counts can appear here and there, which can be expensive if not corrected.
This is where our licensing expertise can help you, using samQ solution we can determine: Which documents originate internally, or which are counted as originating externally from a 3rd party system. Furthermore, samQ optimizes the user licenses so that no user receives a license that is too high. Thus, helping you to identify your SAP User license surplus.
With this information your company can determine how to enter into digital access with accurate information on what volume of documents will be purchased and what will be exchanged for them.
This is always better than approaching SAP with questions and then buying what SAP has estimated or just read out. After all, SAP cannot know the exact requirements and can only make a recommendation.
Ultimately our experts have the appropriate knowledge of where to look, bringing together license inventories that are possibly too expensive and document packages that need to be purchased in such a way that an optimized overall result is created, ensuring a successful negotiation with SAP.
We provide clarity to ensure there is less ambiguity!
Peter Rattey is the founder of VOQUZ Labs. He invented samQ and is still intensively involved in samQ's further development. Peter is one of our most experienced advisors.
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