SAP UK & Ireland User Group is calling on the ERP giant to allow customers to ‘park’ their licenses.
UG chairman Philip Adams told CBR the group has pushed for SAP to give businesses the freedom to temporarily stop paying maintenance on software they are not using while going through a tough period.
‘Parking’ a license would enable businesses to simply reactivate the software when they are in a better financial position and recontinue maintenance payments, without having to buy a license again.
Adams said: "We have been challenging them on the parking of licenses. Generally if you’re on a big contract you just couldn’t cancel part of that contract – it was all or nothing.
"You can’t reactivate it [if you stop paying maintenance]. You end up buying it again. So we will still push on the parking, globally, because businesses scale up and scale down."
SAP went some way to appeasing user groups in August when it announced some changes to its licensing model.
Customers were given the option of linking the purchase of certain on-premise SAP applications to the partial termination of licenses and associated maintenance fees.
But Adams said it is not enough.
"If I bought some applications, I own them, but why should I pay maintenance when I’m not using them?" he told CBR.
"We want the ability for users to be able to just pull them back off the shelf and say ‘look SAP, we’re using this now, we’re happy to pay maintenance’."
The user group previously put pressure on SAP to make switching to its new cloud offerings commercially attractive for existing customers, by letting them exchange on-premise licenses for cloud subscriptions, a move which was finally realised in July.
Adams spoke to CBR at the UG’s annual conference, held this year at the ICC in Birmingham, but said that it would likely be next year’s conference when the user group would begin to see members make the switch to the cloud.
"It’s still early," he said. "It kind of filters through and I think this time next year we’ll tap into our member base."
He said he hoped the ERP firm will continue to promote the independent user group in order for it to reach more customers in Britain and Ireland – it currently has a membership of 600, yet SAP’s customers in the region number 9,000.
And Adams added that a big challenge for those customers remains implementing SAP’s software – more so as the company delves into the worlds of mobile, social and big data.
"How to leverage these things is everyone’s fear. Most customers won’t have the money or the guts to do a big replacement of their core process in one go," he said.
"How can we be sure as a customer that we have the right partner [to implement a solution]? How do you certify those partners?
That’s something we want to charge SAP on, that they encourage us to go to the right partner for the particular technology which we want to invest in."
