SAP today announced that it has postponed planned price increases for its Enterprise Support maintenance program, even as it said related benchmarking efforts “have shown clear value to participating SAP customers.”
The company has formed a task force that will “reach out to customers and user groups” in an effort to “maximize customer value from SAP’s entire support offerings.” The task force, an SAP spokesman told Managing Automation, is intended to “look for ways to engage a broader segment of customers.”
SAP said it plans to report on the task force’s progress at the beginning of 2010. “Until then, a decision on pricing for Enterprise Support has therefore been postponed,” read a statement.
This latest move marks the second time the enterprise software giant has postponed or extended implementation of the maintenance price increases it announced in July 2008. At that time, SAP announced the broad rollout of Enterprise Support, which, for most customers, eventually will carry an annual price tag of 22% of the initial software license charge. Most customers had been paying a 17% annual charge.