Legal gray area

Whatever the reasons, however, SAP has had the topic of "indirect" use on its sales agenda for "only" three years. One question still remains unanswered: Does SAP even have the right to charge "additional" fees for "indirect" usage?

Jürgen Beckers, owner of the law firm Rechtsanwälte BDH in Darmstadt, which specializes in software and IT law, puts it even more directly: Is SAP's licensing policy on indirect use in Germany illegal?

Jürgen Beckers comments:

"While the EU Software Directive 2009/24/EC protects the principle of free connection and interaction (interoperability) of devices and computer programs, SAP customers are to pay additional license fees for the mere exchange of data between SAP ERP software and a third-party application.

Such a licensing policy is not only a major annoyance for existing SAP customers. It also restricts free competition in the SAP ecosystem, as third-party applications that communicate with SAP ERP software become enormously more expensive in this way."

With the idea of "indirect" use, SAP is upsetting many loyal companions. Of the participants in a survey on the subject of "indirect" use, 43 percent have been existing SAP customers for more than 20 years, so they have a lot of experience in dealing with SAP and its licensing policy.

However, only 66 percent are aware of the financial implications of the new PKL, which in turn confirms the view of many German lawyers that these regulations are non-transparent and therefore surprising under Section 305c of the German Civil Code (BGB) and thus invalid.

"Indirect" use can affect anyone and the gray area is difficult to delineate: Payment advices are indispensable as an accompanying medium of a payment medium. At Vedes - Europe's leading retailer for games, leisure and family - payment advices sometimes have up to 4000 individual items and several hundred debtors.

With the help of the Yambs.Avise software tools from Software4Professionals, Vedes has automated the processing of payment advices, saving 80 percent of working time. With the software solution, electronic payment advices can be automatically posted in SAP.

The solution supports widely used electronic advice formats such as Remadv (Edifact), but also individual formats. Data can also be imported directly as an IDoc and posted automatically. In addition, Vedes opted for the Yambs.smart.PDF software, which enables automated processing of PDF advices.

Using a special converter, the program reads PDF documents that were generated systemically without errors and then transfers them directly to SAP. Manual capture or the use of OCR software is therefore no longer necessary.

When asked, E-3 Magazine did not want to disclose any further details about the interface between Software4Professionals and "SAP-ERP". They did not know in which technical and legal gray area they were moving here. Thus, the E-3 editorial team decided not to publish the submitted text.

Many of the business processes are currently orchestrated across multiple applications. Thus, the example of Vedes is not an isolated case. However, this also increases the number of applications and the different technologies used.

This makes organizational and licensing integration the key factor, both on a technical and semantic level. Steffen Pietsch, Chief Technology Officer of DSAG e. V., therefore demands an API-first strategy (Application Programming Interface) from SAP.

This makes all the functions and data of an application accessible via public, standardized and documented interfaces. What is still missing is an adequate licensing model that clearly provides information about costs and the legal framework, but which should be oriented toward interoperability.