SAP support cost to jump up by 30%!

SAP and other firms are getting smarter at the game and as the world goes towards Cloud Computing and as the price of the proprietary software falls dramatically, the support and consulting is where most of the money has to be made. It is a no-brainer anyways, we need to keep making money. As Larry Ellison complained that SaaS or Globally Deliverable Cloud Services, were not that profitable, we saw SAP cleverly increasing its support costs to meet up with the profit margins.

SAP recently announced that it is to introduce a mandatory new support package – dubbed Enterprise Support - that includes support for the company’s NewWeaver SOA infrastructure, something that was not included in the Standard Support contract.

But along with expanded service comes an expanded price tag – the cost of support will move up from 17% of license cost to 22%.

And although SAP has downplayed the significance of this increase, “in real terms this is a 29.4% increase in costs over the next four years for existing SAP customers, and is proving to be a particularly difficult area to accept,” said Alan Bowling, chairman of the UK & Ireland SAP users group.

So more we move towards Cloud Computing, the more we'll see the shelfware software disappear and more of the Webware software being delivered to us through the GDM-aware Clouds.

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