On Friday, 14 November, the European Commission invited stakeholders to submit their comments on the commitments that the German giant SAP has made to safeguard competition in the market of [providing] maintenance for its own Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) business management software.
Made following a formal investigation (see EUROPE 13717/14), SAP’s commitments, which aim to put an end to the anticompetitive practices observed, are as follows: to clarify the conditions allowing SAP customers to divide their system—covering all on-site ERP products and licences—into several distinct parts; enabling customers to choose from among different support service providers for each part; to provide greater access to ‘single-metric contracts’ that allow a different method of calculating licence fees to be used, these fees then serving as the basis for calculating maintenance and support fees; to allow maintenance and support services for unused licences (‘shelfware’) to be ended; to clarify the initial licence term during which customers cannot terminate their support contracts; to eliminate the reinstatement fees charged when customers use support services after a period during which they did not have a support subscription; and to eliminate back maintenance fees over time.
Stakeholders will have one month to respond once the commitments have been published in the Official Journal of the EU. Once they are made binding, these commitments will reportedly apply to all current and future SAP customers worldwide for a period of 10 years. (Original version in French by Mathieu Bion)