Paying more for what you don't use?

E-3: Sympatex has been an existing SAP customer for many years. Which software version was used to launch SAP?

Hasso Ercelebi: The Sympatex Group has been using SAP for over 20 years. We started with SAP R/2 and today we use SAP ERP ECC 6.0 company-wide in conjunction with a typical SAP three-system landscape.

E-3: Can you please give a rough overview of the number of users and their license user types?

Ercelebi: Our approximately 150 users are divided into the user types "Professional" and "Limited Professional User".

E-3: When and how did you first hear about Rimini Street?

Ercelebi: At a time when Rimini Street did not even offer maintenance for SAP systems. I already liked the business model back then, although I rather speculated that the software houses would reduce their margins for the maintenance of their ERP software.

E-3: How did the contact take place?

Ercelebi: I entered my contact details via the Rimini Street homepage, although Rimini Street was not yet represented in Germany at the time. I then received a call back from England.

E-3: What convinced you at the beginning to consider third-party maintenance?

Ercelebi: This was triggered by a request to SAP to decommission a few licenses that we were not using permanently. The strict refusal and insistence on continuing to pay for maintenance for non-existent users coincided with the time when SAP wanted to force its customers out of SAP Standard Support and into Enterprise Support. In effect, this meant more costs for less service used. And for us, the question arose as to whether SAP was still the right partner for us.

E-3: What were the decisive arguments and how did the contract come about?

Ercelebi: Back in 2009, Rimini Street was the only real alternative to regular SAP maintenance. Unfortunately, there were practically no reference customers with long-term experience of third-party maintenance for an SAP system in Germany.

We asked ourselves whether Rimini Street could not only cover all legal changes promptly, but also provide first aid at short notice if our production system was not running properly. In the end, the risk was too great for us, especially with the HR module, for which most of the patches had to be installed.

At the time, we decided to outsource HR from SAP and entrust all other modules to Rimini Street's third-party maintenance.