Thank you, SAP! There are still a few questions...
It is estimated that the SAP community generated approximately $300 billion in revenue in 2018. As a result, many organizations and consultants have prospered in recent years.
For this reason, I would like to thank SAP - also on behalf of the more than 18,000 official partners. Not only shareholders, founders and employees, but above all the partner network benefit from a healthy and stable SAP.
SAP develops good solutions. For example, SAP customers build more than 95,000 cars a day or manufacture 82 percent of all medical devices produced worldwide. The solutions come at a price.
SAP software is not cheap. Like any other creator, SAP has the right to be paid appropriately for intellectual property. Copyright Law, §11 General, second sentence:
"It serves at the same time to secure adequate remuneration for the use of the work."
The only question is what is meant by "reasonable remuneration". Double licensing is clearly not one of them.
NetWeaver OpenHub: After purchasing Business Warehouse (BW), SAP charges an additional fee for data export if the data is further viewed in a non-SAP analytics tool.
SAP explains this additional requirement by saying that its intellectual property lies in the data structure, which is "indirectly used". The term "use" is not only interpreted "generously" by SAP, but is also not applied in all cases in accordance with the Copyright Act (for example, §69c).
The list price for NetWeaver OpenHub is 250,000 euros. Even though very few people have paid this price, they have probably not received any additional value from SAP.
Note: There is also SAP OpenHub for S/4 Hana, which means that also in the future SAP wants to stick to this additional fee. Why does SAP have to charge this fee? Wasn't the use of the software, including the unrestricted use of the data, already adequately remunerated with the purchase of the BW license?
Indirect use: When ERP Central Component (ECC) was launched, there was no mention of indirect use. There was also nothing to be found in the GTCs and the price and conditions list (PKL).
Additional SAP licenses for the partner solutions - with a few exceptions - did not have to be paid to SAP from 1993 to 2014. However, since around 2011, the GTCs have stated that direct and indirect access are subject to licensing.
There was nothing about this in the PKL. Today, the PKL contains the so-called "SAP Platform User", who is authorized to access and use the SAP software via interfaces.
Concrete example: An automotive manufacturer uses SAP software and is sufficiently licensed. A supplier also uses SAP and is also sufficiently licensed. Both decide to connect their SAP systems and exchange data.
Under the new "Digital Access" pricing model, the person for whom documents are generated in the SAP system would now have to license them additionally. Under the old pricing model, the SAP Platform User license would have to be purchased additionally for each user. Isn't this a kind of double licensing?
Similarly, it was not explained to customers at the time that they should pay for additional licenses for the use of self-developed code in addition to the SAP Developer licenses.
"SAP NetWeaver Foundation for Third Party Applications." is the name of the license that customers should buy when the code accesses information in the SAP tables. This is to grant the right to run non-SAP applications on the NetWaever runtime environment in addition to the NetWeaver Foundation runtime usage right.
In other words, the customer should pay for the use of the runtime environment in addition to the purchased runtime usage rights and the SAP Developer license. Wouldn't it be "reasonable" if SAP existing customers only pay once for the use of the runtime environment? Thank you, dear SAP, for everything! But we think: If you pay once, you pay enough.
