SAP had been positioning S/4HANA as a completely new product and therefore there were concerns from many of you that customers would be subject to new license fees if you decided to migrate to S/4HANA.
We’ve had good dialogue with SAP over the past few months and it has now clarified the licensing model. Regardless of whether you see S/4 HANA as an upgrade or a new platform it is clear SAP has recognised that existing customers paying maintenance have made significant financial contributions to the development of the platform and therefore won’t be expecting existing ERP customers to pay for user licenses. In effect, your current ERP application licenses will just transition over. You can also choose to stay with your existing user licensing model or switch to a new one.
The flat fee referred to on the pricing model slide will be around €9,000 regardless of the size of your organisation. This is a one-off cost for "converting" the existing application to the new application. Of course there will also be the cost of licenses for the HANA platform if you haven’t purchased these before.
“This really shows the value of the User Group and SUGEN. There was a real risk that we would have been subjected to new license costs, but through our discussions with SAP we’ve ensured that members won’t be subject to millions of pounds of re-licensing costs. SAP has shown again that it takes the view of its user community seriously, constructively engaging with us to ensure that customers continue to maximise the value gained from their SAP investments,” noted Philip Adams, chairman of the UK & Ireland SAP User Group.
