The deconstruction of the SAP ecosystem

There is an anecdote in the SAP community that Hasso Plattner once owned the only Porsche Carrera with a trailer hitch so that he could always have his sailboat, which was much smaller at the time, with him.

How do we know this? At the time, one of Austria's largest existing SAP customers had a massive ERP problem. Without further ado, Plattner drove by Vienna on his way south. He parked his Porsche and sailboat in the customer's parking lot, helped solve the problem, and continued his journey toward the Mediterranean.

From the very beginning, the existing SAP customer was also a development partner, a source of ideas, a test center, and always open to business, organizational, and technical discussions.

The "ugly" word IP - Intellectual Property - did not yet exist in the current understanding at that time. Ideas, concepts and solutions were exchanged and evaluated as a team.

It was the time of Dietmar Hopp and Hasso Plattner. Hopp is an enthusiastic supporter of team sports. He knows neither envy nor fear of contact.

The canteen in Walldorf was open to everyone for a long time, which unfortunately some fellows shamelessly exploited. Plattner was the technical genius from the very beginning. He was the visionary; without him, SAP would "only" be the ERP world market leader today.

Now this friendly cooperation is breaking up because SAP is executing "indirect use": The more interesting phenomenon is the incipient disintegration of SAP's ecosystem.

Legally speaking, "indirect use" of data and algorithms is an almost endless list of positive and negative arguments. In practice, however, SAP's approach destroys established trust on all sides.

Existing customers are unsettled and stop projects or adapt their roadmaps. SAP partners lose their business basis because supplements and add-ons can now become significantly more expensive for the end user.

A real example, the company involved and the name of the CIO are known to the E-3 editorial team: Dormakaba offers time and attendance terminals that can communicate directly with SAP's HR/HCM system.

Of course, our SAP inventory customer has properly licensed the HR system including ESS and MSS (Employee and Manager Self Services).

But now, this year, SAP is charging an indirect-use fee for the Dormakaba terminals in the form of user licenses for each employee who uses the time and attendance terminals - in extreme cases, from cleaners to the board of directors.

And because the Dormakaba terminals are technically managed by a Windows server with SQL server, Microsoft is now coming and wants a Client Access License, CAL - indirect use at Microsoft!

This makes the system unfinanceable - apart from any legal examination. Our user now has to pay the following license costs for software: Dormakaba terminal SW, Windows operating system, SQL database server, SAP NetWeaver PI/XI, ERP/ECC 6.0 plus HR/HCM and ESS/MSS and corresponding operating system, middleware and database licenses for the ERP system - and then SAP and Microsoft come along and demand supplementary license fees for indirect use?

Indirect usage results in the deconstruction of SAP's ecosystem. The end user is forced to disassemble and dissolve his IT infrastructure because the cost trap and the risk of having to pay millions of euros in back license fees are simply too high.

Separate systems and IT islands know no indirect use. But they also do not correspond to our image of an SAP architecture.