Forrester’s Duncan Jones summarizes why I did not go to Uwe Hummel’s session on Enterprise Support at the SAP Summit.
“In fact, (SAP) is so convinced in proactive support and the positive impact on customers' SAP application management and operation costs that it decided to protect them from making the mistake of declining to buy it - by making it mandatory.”
Passions are already running high in the customer base around the topic that I did not need to go annoy Uwe even more than I have in the past.
In all the discussion about KPIs that SUGEN is tracking at over 50 member sites, I have been puzzled. If KPIs at customer sites are important, should that measurement not be independent of the vendor – and certainly not involve them dictating terms like usage of tools like Solution Manager?
But more importantly, we seem to have forgotten who is the vendor and who is the customer. Should not the vendor be disclosing its internal metrics? SAP’s own cost of support has declined nicely over the years particularly for more mature customers – with fewer support calls, with lowered offshore support of its own, more automation of frequently asked questions, and increasingly more routine queries being handled in the SDN community.
It also justifies the move to 22% because Oracle charges that knowing fully well from its TomorrowNow sub (now in litigation with Oracle) that Oracle’s maintenance is one of the sorest points in its relationships with its customers. And that SAP has a higher application license base value per customer.
It’s time for the conversation to turn to SAP’s internal metrics – and for it to show what its customers are paying on average per support call, per bug fix that applied to them etc.
I am on record as saying the $ 600 military toilet looks cheap compared to what SAP charges at that unit of measure level. As I have written several times before even 17% maintenance is too high for many mature customers. Let’s start with that cost=plus hypothesis rather than 22% is justified based on “value” which SAP may or may not be influencing.
