New license options

SAP CEO Bill McDermott was two minutes into his keynote at Sapphire when empathy began to emerge. He admitted that Indirect Access, also known as indirect use, is a cause for concern for many; SAP has now introduced new licensing options because of it. So the discussion about SAP licenses isn't going away anytime soon.

Indirect use has been a recurring theme in the press lately, most notably in the Diageo case and the AB InBev case, with which SAP still had an outstanding bill - for £54 million and $600 million respectively.

But there's more to it than that: SAP is pushing S/4 Hana in the cloud and the IoT initiatives with SAP Leonardo are doing their bit to ensure that more and more data flows through SAP systems.

This means that even companies that want to move to the cloud are stuck. They wonder if license costs won't continue to rise in the future. SAP is now proposing to measure indirect usage on the basis of orders, that is, on the business result instead of the number of users.

But it is still unclear how expensive these new license calculations will be. In any case, companies should check whether the calculations proposed by SAP are actually compatible with their business purpose.

SAP has also introduced the concept of "static read". This underscores SAP's statement that customer data really does belong to customers. This is a clear step forward.

After all, just because the data was in the SAP system, customers shouldn't have to pay to view it outside the SAP system. Static Read is now part of the underlying software license.

The new contract supplements are not mandatory. Companies must assess for themselves whether the changes will make them financially better or worse off. As far as other indirect use scenarios are concerned, there is still uncertainty among customers and partners.