Customers organize against SAPs new service model

Frankfurt am Main, 30 November 2008

Since the summer of 2008 SAP customers are sharing their worries about the services provided by SAP openly. Specifically since these organizations selected SAP as a strategic IT partner and feel that they are heavily dependant on them.

It has all started with the BI Accelerator a hardware solution to fix the performance issues of SAP BW (Netweaver BI). At a very high cost SAP and hardware providers like IBM and HP provide the ability to process queries using "cache" memory. Obviously a limited and highly complex solution not all addressing the root cause of the problem or adding any value to the business. Many SAP customers told us that they believe SAP should have solved these issues without charging the costs of their problem (i.e. a slow SAP BW) to the customer.

Things have escalated with SAP's accouncement of the changes in the maintenance and support model. The bottomline of the message: "customer you have to pay more for the same". And as said in the introduction the "strategic choice" organizations makes it difficult to turn down the new conditions that SAP has forced on them.

It appears that in Austria, a country in which customers have prooven extremely loyal to SAP organizations have organized themselves and addressed their worries in an open letter to SAP AG Board members.

Surely SAP has build revolutionary software with R/2 and R/3 but the same name is no panacea for everything.