Christmas for the SAP Community

This year we have given ourselves a gift: From Gartner came up with the idea of sifting through and evaluating our licenses in the form of a workshop.

Exciting hours and fruitful insights came out of it. We had a similar working session in 2001 and now, after twelve years, the story should be continued.

Of course, we use relevant tools for license management. Our controlling and in-house lawyers do a perfect job. And often enough SAP to a license measurement somewhere present.

Thus, the issue was not over-licensing or under-licensing!

We set ourselves a much more difficult task: consolidating the existing licenses with the possible and actually used functions.

Full customization

Right at the beginning of the Gartner-meetings, there was a PowerPoint screen whose content is not new to me, but of which I was not aware: Over the years, the SAP adapted almost the entire licensing scheme, not always to the advantage of us existing customers.

Shortly after the turn of the millennium, user-license funcionality was still the dominant model, along with a few engine prices.

It was the mySAP.com period from about 2000 to 2002.

Then came the age of Business Suite (2002 to 2006) and user-license functionality and engines were equally represented in the price list.

From 2006 propagated SAP vehemently applications with engines and packages prices.

Admittedly, this has always been of secondary importance for the Group, since we operate under GEA/PSLE (Note: The Group is not a subsidiary of GEA/PSLE). Red.: Global Enterprise Agreement and Product Support for Large Enterprises with 17 percent maintenance fee).

All license topics covered

The workshop with Gartner but was organized jointly with the divisional CIOs and industry holdings, so we had every licensing topic on the agenda.

And it was really interesting to see from a higher perspective how SAP The functional offering has shifted from User Licenses to Engines and Packages.

For the sake of completeness and for my colleagues at the SAP-Stammtisch.

Application User Licenses are currently based on the following types:

• Developer
• Professional
• Limited Professional
• Employee
• Special or Customized User
• Employee Self Service
• ESS Core.

The punch line and at the same time warning of the analysts of Gartner is the covert conversion of existing license agreements.

So if you still have an old mySAP.com contract, you should not let yourself be talked out of it under any circumstances, because there may still be a lot of user rights hidden there that will vanish into thin air with a changed contract or have to be activated again with expensive engine prices.

Even if not all rights from the mySAP.com contract have been activated so far - who knows what the future will bring?

Gartner explicitly points out to carefully study the license agreements plus meticulous documentation when concluding the contract about performance and rights.

Why? We live together with our SAP in a very dynamic time: What is allowed today, must be bought tomorrow by an expensive engines.

Constantly changing product names and metrics don't make things easy.

Industry 4.0

Another topic: After the shameful E-3 cover story in November "Industry 4.0", I asked around. It wasn't entirely wrong, but the horizon was set too narrowly.

Industry 4.0 may become a topic, but what is already a topic and becoming a megatrend: IoE, Internet of Everything.

Ex-SAP-CEO Henning Kagermann propagated it in his active days: Internet of Things. Only back then, no one wanted to listen to him.

Today it seems to be different and we are only at the beginning of the development:

The next IT revolution will be triggered by a very simple fact: Every thing that costs more than 100 euros has at least one sensor in it.

As I said, I asked around the product development departments in the Group and got the same information almost everywhere.

Chip prices are falling rapidly, so that an Internet-capable interface will be available almost everywhere. And then we need IPv6 and maybe Hanato cope with the amount of data from all these sensors again.

Last but not least

Last topic for this year: Those who regularly read my E-3 column know about the ambivalent topic of Hana vs. DB2 Blu.

On the edge of our Gartner-At the first meeting, I asked for the analysts' assessment.

Short answer: Forget Oracle and IBM DB2 Blu, because for SAP-The "killer application" for existing customers comes from Microsoft with the SQL-Server 2014.

This has been adapted for years to the needs of R/3 trained and will also have an in-memory computing extension starting next year.

Hana is even faster today, but little optimized for the real needs of my business suite - for my group it will therefore be at IBM DB2 Blu remain, my SAP-I advise my fellow regulars to take a look at MS SQL Server 2014.

Thank you for your loyalty to my column, happy holidays and a prosperous 2014.