SAP's recent decision to revamp its support and maintenance offerings - a move that will mean higher fees for some customers - will help the software provider deal with increasingly complex, multi-vendor customer environments, SAP officials said.
"We're seeing an evolution of customer landscapes," said Mark Cordrey, vice president of SAP Active Global Support, in an interview with Managing Automation. "They are more complex, with many other third-party products being integrated into SAP."
SAP's Enterprise Support offering includes a new version of the company's Solution Manager and a new operational methodology, RUN SAP, which, among other things, allows customers and SAP to track down and fix problems that crop up when third-party products are integrated with SAP applications, Cordrey said. The new Enterprise Support offering includes tools and services that support root cause analysis of those problems.
Enterprise Support also includes service-level agreements (SLAs) for problem resolution and a 24-hour-per-day, seven-day-per-week support adviser service.