I have always respected SAP for being a "listening" company. At
Gartner we would have heated debates with them but they would listen and morph.
Several analysts would spend days with them in Walldorf each year and they
would share plans, often disagree but more often than not implement what we
recommended.
TomorrowNow, a unit of SAP, has sponsored a white paper written by my old
Gartner colleague Erik Keller. "Taking
the "Entitlement" Out of Enterprise Software" (registration
required). (Hey, it even includes a chart I created at Gartner - the TCO of
Enterprise Software. Wish he had used a non-paper napkin version of the chart.)
TomorrowNow offers third party, cheaper, limited service maintenance options to a number of
Oracle application customers. In that sense, SAP is a white knight to steady
state Oracle customers tired of paying 22% maintenance.
But SAP does not offer a similar product to its own customers. If anything,
SAP recently introduced a Premium support product at 22% (up from its standard
17% annual maintenance). As with Oracle customers there are many SAP
customers at each end of the "bell curve" - just starting
implementation or those at steady state and not as interested in future
releases. There is a huge opportunity for a TommorowNow type offering in the
SAP customer base as I wrote here.
If you threaten SAP to cancel maintenance or go with a third party provider,
they will reluctantly discount maintenance. But for a smart, learning company
it has been slow to acknowledge the need is wider in its customer base and to
proactively introduce an offering.
If they do not, some of their competitors may soon be offering their own white papers to SAP customers. SAP is smart enough to not allow those vendors become white knights to its customers.
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