Construction site and hope: licenses

It is obvious that SAP wants to achieve growth through higher license fees and not through better performance and more functions. The fear in the SAP community is an increase in the calculation basis for the fees by 20 to 50 percent after a switch to the cloud.

With CPEA credits (Cloud Platform Enterprise Agreement) and FUE (Full Usage Equivalent), SAP has created a highly sophisticated tool for license transformation. But calculations have shown that the unfiltered application of these SAP methods causes sustainable additional costs for the existing customer.

What is to be done? The best option for the existing SAP customer is to consolidate their on-prem license base. Accordingly, all licenses must be reviewed before an S/4 cloud release switch. According to SAP's plan, the license types are not transferred one-to-one from an on-prem system to the cloud, but are transformed via a key, Full Usage Equivalent.

This FUE transformation can result in higher license revenues for SAP - but it doesn't have to! If the existing customer analyzes and adjusts its licenses in advance and actively manages the transformation process, savings of up to 20 percent can result.

However, this complex task is hardly manageable without expert help. In the meantime, numerous SAP partners have specialized in this FUE license analysis and a cost-saving transformation to the cloud. The existing SAP customer should therefore not go down the path to the cloud alone.