Your annual support bill is designed to keep you spending. We challenge unfair pricing, evaluate third-party alternatives, and negotiate terms that reflect actual value. Enterprise buyers save millions when they understand their leverage.
SAP Enterprise Support is priced at 22% of your net licence value annually. That's not a service level—that's a tax on your software investment. For a customer with £5 million in net licence value, that's £1.1 million every year, in perpetuity, whether you're actively using the support or not.
What makes this worse is that SAP actively discourages customers from moving to independent support providers like Rimini Street or Spinnaker Support. They enforce contractual restrictions, lock in hidden dependencies through indirect access clauses tied to support contracts, and make the Maintenance Schedule—the rules governing what you can and cannot do with your licence—contingent on staying with SAP support. Want to move to third-party support? SAP will threaten audit and indirect access exposure. It's leverage dressed up as policy.
We've seen it repeatedly: enterprise buyers treat SAP support renewals like utility bills—necessary, unavoidable, not worth negotiating. But they're wrong. SAP Enterprise Support is one of the most negotiable line items in your licence agreement. SAP knows most buyers won't push back. Your CFO sees it as a compliance line item. Your CIO sees it as a vendor lock-in. Nobody's fighting for better terms, which is exactly what SAP counts on.
The truth: your current support contract was negotiated for SAP's benefit, not yours. SAP's Standard Support is cheaper but comes with longer response times and bug-fix priorities that don't align with critical business issues. Yet neither addresses the core problem: you're paying too much for a service you might not need in its current form. Third-party support providers exist specifically to challenge this model, but moving requires proof that your system remains compliant and that you haven't accidentally triggered indirect access violations. SAP's own Maintenance Schedule is written to make this difficult.
We forensically review your SAP Enterprise Support contract—cost structure, renewal terms, hidden clauses, and compliance obligations. We identify overpayments, unused entitlements, and contractual vulnerabilities before the next renewal conversation.
We evaluate whether Rimini Street, Spinnaker Support, or other independent providers are viable for your environment. This includes risk assessment, licence compliance validation, and indirect access exposure analysis—the real blockers SAP doesn't want you thinking about.
We handle the conversation with SAP on your behalf. Our team are former SAP insiders—we know how SAP prices, where they'll concede, and how to position the conversation so you extract maximum value. We push back on unfair terms, challenge cost assumptions, and build defensible negotiation positions.
Not every customer needs Enterprise Support. We challenge SAP's assumptions about what you require and model alternatives—can you move to Standard Support plus targeted incident-based support? Can you hybrid model (SAP for core systems, third-party elsewhere)? We build the business case.
We design hybrid strategies: SAP Enterprise Support for critical systems, third-party support for non-critical workloads, and internal resources optimized for your actual needs. This reduces cost while maintaining risk control and compliance.
We request your SAP licence agreement, support contract, and current renewal documentation. We forensically review cost structure, term constraints, and hidden clauses. We identify gaps in your knowledge about what you're paying for.
We analyse whether third-party support is viable, assess indirect access exposure, and model hybrid support scenarios. We validate licence compliance risk under different support models and flag contractual blockers.
We build your position: cost benchmarking, competitive leverage (third-party alternatives), industry precedent, and fair pricing models. We prepare you for SAP conversations and handle direct negotiation if you prefer. We know SAP's playbook.
We document new terms, ensure compliance requirements are clearly defined, and monitor enforcement. If you move to third-party support, we verify that you maintain licence compliance and manage the transition risk professionally.
You're tired of support costs that keep rising while the value stays flat. You know this is a negotiable contract, but you don't know your leverage or what market rates should be. We quantify the savings opportunity and build the business case for change.
You're caught between SAP's aggressive support positioning and your need to reduce costs without compromising system stability. You want to explore third-party support but you're not sure about licence compliance or indirect access risk. We de-risk the conversation.
You own the support contract renewal and you know there's money on the table. You're negotiating with SAP but you don't have independent perspective or credible alternatives. We give you the ammunition to push back effectively.
Your support contract doesn't have to be a fixed cost. We've helped enterprise buyers reduce support spend while maintaining compliance and risk control. Let's talk about your situation—no obligation, no pitch.
Start Your Free ConsultationSAP Enterprise Support is SAP's premium support tier, priced at 22% of your net licence value annually. It includes guaranteed response times, priority bug fixes, and access to advanced support tools. The 22% rate is standardized—SAP doesn't negotiate the percentage itself, but they absolutely negotiate the licence value on which it's based. That's where your leverage is. The cost structure is designed to lock in recurring revenue: the higher your licence value, the higher your support cost. As you add users or modules, your support bill rises automatically.
The 22% percentage is fixed, but the licence value on which it's calculated is highly negotiable. More importantly, the contract terms, renewal conditions, and what's included in the service are negotiable. We've successfully pushed back on: hidden escalation clauses, unfair termination penalties, bundled services you don't use, and automatic renewal assumptions. SAP prefers you think it's all standard pricing. It isn't.
Enterprise Support includes faster response times (4-hour SLA for critical issues), higher-priority bug fix queues, and proactive system monitoring. Standard Support has longer response times (24-48 hours for critical issues) and treats all customers with equal priority. For many organizations, Standard Support is sufficient—the question is whether the faster response times justify the extra cost. We've helped customers move to Standard Support or hybrid models (Enterprise for critical systems, Standard elsewhere) and save millions while maintaining acceptable service levels.
Yes, but you need to be careful. SAP uses support contracts as leverage to control indirect access and system configuration decisions. When you move to third-party support, you must ensure: your system remains compliant with SAP's Maintenance Schedule (the rules governing what you're allowed to do), your indirect access position is clearly documented and defensible, and you're not accidentally violating licence terms through system changes. We audit all three areas before you switch. Many customers successfully use Rimini Street or Spinnaker Support, but SAP will try to scare you into believing it's risky. It's not—if done correctly.
It depends on your situation. If you negotiate from your current position, expect 10-20% reductions on support cost. If you're willing to move to Standard Support or hybrid models, expect 40-60% reductions. If you move to third-party support entirely, you can reduce support costs by 70% or more—but you're making a different choice about risk and vendor relationship. We've seen customers save £2M+ annually on support alone. The average is £500K+. Start with a conversation about your specific situation.