SAP has agreed to overhaul key elements of its on-premises software maintenance and licensing policies after reaching an agreement with the European Commission that ends an antitrust investigation and allows the enterprise software provider to avoid potential fines.
The commitments follow an investigation by the European Commission in 2025 into whether SAP’s licensing and support practices limited competition by making it difficult for customers to switch to third-party maintenance providers or terminate support agreements. Regulators expressed concern that contractual restrictions increased costs and discouraged companies from seeking alternative support services for SAP’s on-prem ERP software.
The policy changes were announced after negotiations between SAP, European regulators and customer representatives, including the German-speaking SAP User Group (DSAG), which pushed for greater flexibility in how companies manage long-term SAP deployments. DSAG said the changes will help customers make decisions based on business needs rather than contractual limitations, especially as companies use hybrid environments that mix on-prem with cloud services.
Providing Greater Flexibility
Under the agreement, SAP will introduce a series of changes that will remain in force for 10 years.
Among the most significant changes is a new framework that allows customers to divide their SAP environments into separate commercial installations. This allows companies to select different levels of SAP support for individual environments, opt out of SAP support for specific installations or use third-party maintenance providers where appropriate. The changes are created to provide enterprises greater control over support strategies across complex IT environments.
SAP will also expand the availability of single-metric licensing contracts, giving customers an alternative method for calculating software license fees and related maintenance charges. The new model is intended to make ongoing support costs more predictable while allowing maintenance fees to scale more closely with changing business conditions.
Additional licensing flexibility will be available for enterprises that need to reduce unused software licenses under special circumstances. These include major workforce reductions, divestitures, bankruptcy proceedings, implementation failures and products that have entered customer-specific maintenance.
While the agreement focuses exclusively on maintenance and support for on-premises software, SAP emphasized that its cloud offerings, including SAP S/4HANA Cloud and RISE with SAP, are unaffected.
