I know it’s summer in the UK and it seems wrong to be talking about Christmas but… As you are probably aware every year around Christmas you receive an invoice for SAP Licence Maintenance, whether from SAP directly or from your appointed re-seller. This figure is a percentage of the ‘buy’ price and provides, in the case of Enterprise Support, an organisation with application management and innovation to support your IT processes for the coming year. Did you know that unless there are extenuating circumstances you can only change this arrangement by giving notice to change in September? Hence why now is a good time to start talking about Christmas!

Is this annual maintenance fit for purpose? Does it represent value for money now and next year? There are two things we believe you need to address:

• Firstly, is this the best deal for the ‘buy’ price you can get – can you change to a more flexible VAR who can add further innovation or application management into your existing operational budget, or even lower it? Are you getting the benefits from ES from your licence holder or are you just seeing the invoice?

• Secondly, how is this SAP licence arrangement affected by your move to the cloud? How do you switch SAP licences to go from perpetual to subscription and who can help you? Do you have to buy all your licences from scratch?

For Christmas I would like a reduction in maintenance charges, a quarterly innovation day devoted to me, an annual bespoke code review, sizing report, 24×7 help-desk, and someone to help me offset my investment in perpetual licences to fund my strategic journey to cloud and subscription models – at no cost, please.

If you want to understand how your Christmas wishes can come true you will need to start thinking about this in July. Please feel free to give us call or email to arrange an audit and proposition for your business.