Digital Access Licensing was a key topic at the UKISUG conference in Birmingham

The 30th birthday of the SAP User Group was celebrated this week in Birmingham and the event certainly had a festive feel with cakes galore and keynotes conducted in a spirit of celebration and collaboration.

Adaire Fox-Martin, Executive Board Member, SAP SE, led the keynote session, where she spoke of the biggest challenge facing companies today being the pace of change – with innovation being the key to mastering this and trust as a critical role in the innovation process. Adaire went on to say that successful companies put customers first. SAP is trying to do this in a number of ways. It has been working closely with its user groups – the UKISUG here in the UK, DSUG in Germany and ASUG in the USA – and directly with customers and analysts. The outcome of this work led to two major announcements in April:

The keynote session was followed by a Q&A with Adaire and the recently appointed UK and Ireland MD, Jens Amail, and a discussion took place about Digital Access Licensing. SAP believes the new model is fair and forward looking and are keen to talk to customers if they have any concerns. Paul Cooper, chairman of the UKISUG, asked if SAP would be willing to work on some anonymized data examples to give customers real illustrations of the new model in practice and Adaire was prepared to discuss this.

This all sounds positive, but will it pan out over time?

One of the concerns the user group has with the licensing model is that pricing can only go up – not down. Companies may become more efficient or change business processes and, in these cases, users would want to be able to reduce their digital document liability.

To ensure the new license model is an attractive proposition, customers need to have good visibility into what their liability under this model would be and to date, the tools provided by SAP are very rudimentary.

How can snow help?

Snow Optimizer for SAP® Software helps with many issues around SAP licensing including Indirect Access: building a baseline, optimizing user licenses, managing and administrating users and license contracts, controlling engines, automating processes, and controlling and mitigating Indirect Usage. Snow’s new Digital Access Estimator provides all the information SAP customers need to reduce indirect access risk and make an informed decision about the most cost-effective licensing model for their organization.  Snow’s solution delivers a clear and concise overview of how many digital documents are being created, who is creating them and whether they would count as digital access under the new licensing model – all the key elements necessary to compare existing license costs to predicted under the SAP Digital Access license model.

 

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