“SAP said Wednesday that Siemens has signed a three-year renewal of its software maintenance agreement, an announcement that would seem to quell widespread speculation that the global engineering and electronics company was considering dumping vendor-provided support in favor of lower-cost alternatives.” PC World
I checked with Helmuth Guembel at Strategy Partners (I worked with him at Gartner) who is close to a number of SAP customers in Europe. His sources tell him other details SAP chose not to publicize.
He hears Siemens got the deal at under euro 20 million a year compared to the euro 35 million they were paying earlier. They also got perks such as MaxAttention, extended maintenance on some Siemens specific enhancements thrown in and also got some shelfware off maintenance.
SAP will, of course, publicly deny this and Siemens will, of course, publicly not confirm it. And they are very justified in not sharing the gory details.
What cannot be denied is more and more mature SAP shops are questioning the value of the maintenance dollar. If only SAP would let the maintenance rates float - so far lower for mature SAP customers, all this gossip, intrigue and badwill with customers would go away.
Instead SAP, will like Oracle, let customers leak away to Rimini and other third party maintenance providers one by one– Oracle’s losses are already in the hundreds of customers. Or discount heavily when push comes to shove.
And try to spin via PR every thing is just honky-dory.
