SAP licenses - technology beats law

Part 1 - Stefan Autengruber:

Indirect use - who defines it? As a lawyer, one starts with the question: What is the legal basis? Only when it is clear which legal norms are to be applied do you discuss the facts of the case.

Subsumption of the facts to the legal propositions yields the answer. Indirect use is based on two bases of entitlement: on the one hand, copyright, which protects the author and entitles him to claim a license fee for his intellectual work, and on the other hand, a contractual agreement.

Without going into the differences in legal detail, it should be noted that indirect SAP use refers (almost) exclusively to the contractual agreements.

SAP now offers two indirect usage models. The customer has the right to choose. In order to be able to decide on a model, one must know or work out the advantages and risks of each model.

In the Documents license model, this is done by counting all documents that are originally created in the ERP system. It must be distinguished exactly by document type whether it was created by an employee or an external party.

This is a complex task for which SAP does not currently provide any automated reports. The effort remains with the licensee and it is questionable whether a basic administrator also knows all documents of the department and can qualify them correctly.

With the named-user license model, the path is just as arduous and difficult. Only those who know and reconcile all of SAP's contracts and all of its price and condition lists (PKL) across every additional purchase can generate an overall understanding of indirect usage.

Anyone who gets lost in the jungle of different terminology should be warned: the term modification is interpreted in contradictory ways by technicians and contract experts. This often results in a licensing chaos that SAP has never clarified.

At some point, they had simply switched to the term "use", which is only correct in the core of the term. Therefore the advice to SAP customers: Only those who analyze their license model according to the SAP price lists and know which documents are generated and how can objectively decide which of the models is the most favorable.

Part 2 - Dyer:

SAP has presented a new licensing model for "indirect use" that seems tidy and logical at first glance. Whether something like indirect use can also exist in real life or whether it is just a mirage (see E-3 column "The Last" on page 95 of this issue) will not be discussed further here.

The new SAP license model is based on the production of documents and distinguishes between several document classes for this purpose. At SAP's request, the existing customer only has to pay for the production of a document: a maximum of 50 cents.

There are volume discounts and "inferior" documents that are cheaper to produce. An outsider may find these licensing rules transparent and fair.

Andreas Oczko, board member of the SAP user association DSAG, helped negotiate these rules and finds them useful. For some existing SAP customers, these new rules may ease the fear of "indirect use.

But here the calculation was made without the host - whereby this time the host does not appear in the form of a lawyer, but as a computer scientist. You don't have to know much about IT to guess the challenge of clearly determining the birthplace of a document in a complex SAP system - and only then can the right license invoices be issued.

With traditional IT tools, it is almost impossible to track down the point of origin in an SAP system distributed across dozens of servers - on-premise and in the cloud - and say with absolute certainty that it is a "new" document, because only then may the document counter be set in motion.

Imagine a global SAP system consisting of ERP/ECC 6.0, Abap and Java stacks, NetWeaver instances, S/4 on-premise and as SAP Cloud Platform including Ariba, SuccessFactors, Hybris, Concur, BusinessObjects etc. connected to thousands of IoT sensors and other software components like Salesforce and Office 365.

SAP also announced tools for measuring the birthplace of the relevant documents when presenting the new "indirect use" licensing model.

Should there ever be such a document license survey tool that also works to the satisfaction of DSAG and existing customers - respect!