Business-critical software demands new kind of support

After reading the article “EuroCIO denounces Microsoft and SAP”, which appeared in Data News on 6 March, I’d like to share some thoughts on the support services that SAP offers its customers. For a long time ‘support’ in the ICT sector was synonymous with ‘ensuring that the systems keep running’. But for the companies supporting their business-critical processes with software, this isn’t the end of the story. In this current challenging climate especially, these organizations want their applications to provide them with continuous value and help them to be quick in anticipating changes in market and business conditions. This is the only way for them to maintain a competitive edge. Software suppliers may like to point to concepts like SOA and clear upgrade possibilities for their software, but customers expect more. They want their supplier to help them think about the added value of the software, as well as offer support for achieving and maintaining this value. With this in mind, last year we introduced the standard support model Enterprise Support. Here, SAP takes greater responsibility for guaranteeing the quality of the systems at the customer’s site and the customer also receives supplementary advice services for introducing new capabilities and innovations. Additionally, we also extended our standard support period by two years, so that customers have a long-term guarantee for their investment. As reported in the article of 6 March, this new support model has a new price tag. Since last year new customers are paying 22% support costs – the average market price for standard support services. And for the first time in 10 years, the support contributions of existing customers are to be index-linked each year by 8% until 2012, so as to reach 22% by that point. What we are really proud of, however, is that our customers will be able to reduce their TCO because of the many new services on offer. They will be able to free up time and resources to focus on what really matters in today’s world: not just keeping the system running with limited resources but ensuring that the business applications can support the organization even more efficiently and rapidly enhance all the business processes with added value. Today, more than ever, this is our leitmotif. What’s more, we’ll keep on listening to the market, our customers and user groups so that we keep getting better at anticipating their wishes.