SAP Enhances Value Of Customer Relationships

SAP AG has announced a series of initiatives focused on enhancing value in the relationship between SAP and its customers. These include a new maintenance strategy, new and revised features of SAP Enterprise Support, and a special programme to bring SAP’s latest technology platform to all customers.

Revised Maintenance Strategy

Effective immediately, SAP is extending its maintenance offering to provide a total of nine years of support, delivering maintenance for SAP’s latest offerings through 2017. SAP is extending its 5-1-2 strategy to seven years, with an additional option for two years of extended maintenance, starting with SAP ERP 6.0 and any new core applications from the SAP Business Suite introduced by SAP going forward. This 7-2 offering provides customers more time to deploy and realise return on investment via SAP enhancement packages.

New and Revised Elements of SAP Enterprise Support

Now, as part of SAP Enterprise Support, customers are provided up to five days remote advice per year by software architects to assist in evaluating the innovation capabilities of the latest SAP enhancement package and how it may be deployed for business process requirements. This added support will help customers speed time to value for their investments.

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SAP has also provided additional clarification and concrete deliverables for areas of SAP Enterprise Support around SAP Solution Manager, enterprise edition, and mission critical support services, including:

-- Custom Code Support: For custom code built with an SAP development workbench, SAP provides mission-critical support root-cause analysis for priority ‘very high’ and ‘high’ messages. SAP will offer up to two checks per solution per year to help avoid conflicts between planned custom code/modifications and SAP enhancement packages, based on required minimum documentation.

-- Testing Efficiency Improvement: SAP will deliver pre-configured test cases with the SAP Solution Manager, as part of solution configuration templates, to help customers optimise test activities for SAP and non-SAP systems by assisting customers in determining the full scope of testing required.

-- Enterprise Support Report: SAP will deliver one SAP Enterprise Support report per year on-demand, providing recommendations to maximise the value received from SAP Enterprise Support.

-- Guidelines for Configuration and Operations: For future SAP products and solutions, SAP will provide guidelines and pre-defined content for configuration, as well as best practices for system administration and end-to-end solution operations.

Paving the Way for Customers to SOA Platform

Knowing that some SAP mid-market customers want to experience the benefits resulting from its latest generation solutions, SAP will study how to make it easier for customers to make the transition. SAP said it was collaborating with its user groups and partners to evaluate how SAP R/3-centric customers can best migrate to the company’s enhancement package architecture based on SAP ERP 6.0 and enabled by SAP Enterprise Support. SAP will help these customers reach a secure and efficient path to SAP ERP 6.0 by leveraging its experiences in solution integration.

Gerhard Oswald, member of the Executive Board, SAP AG, said, “SAP Enterprise Support is the long-term, value realisation focused partnership agreement between SAP and its customers. These latest initiatives announced today not only provide direct access to SAP to accelerate innovation, but provide the safeguards for business continuity and reduced cost of operations with a longer return on investment.”