To be fair, since I initially posted a blog sharing my hope for better dialogue between SAP and its customers over the support increase, such discussion between SAP and its customer base seems to have begun. Good signs include: SAP conceding that the announcement of the fee hike could have been better handled; SAP softening the blow of the support increase by extending the years covered by the agreement, and most recently, as noted by Dennis Howlett, SAP working on a new set of KPIs by which “Enterprise Support” can be judged, in order to deliver the value that SAP believes will more than justify the increase to 22 percent.

Few seem to have heard of this new development on the KPI front. In his entry on the departure of ASUG CEO Steve Strout and the general discontent of SAP customers over the support fee issue, Howlett notes: “Earlier in the year, SAP and ASUG issued a joint statement regarding the forthcoming price hike in maintenance where it appeared that ASUG was in enthusiastic support of SAP’s action. In the meantime, I have struggled to find a single customer that is happy with SAP’s proposals, although it is now understood that roll out of the price hike is contingent upon SAP meeting as yet to be agreed KPIs.”

News Update: Of course, just this week, there have been more developments on the SAP support front, revolving around SAP’s decision to allow SAP customers in Austria and Germany to remain on their current support contracts though 2009. No one knows what the ultimate effects of this decision will be yet. The implications are complex enough to have required a whole different blog post, which I have now posted, so you can read more details there. However, I’m not sure that these changes effect the spirit of this post, which takes a closer look at the day-to-day support experience. Onward.

The purpose of this blog post is to look at the support issue from a different angle and share a couple of proactive suggestions that were relayed to me. I recently had the opportunity to talk with a couple of SAP users. They provided me with a perspective from the hands-on angle of a technical manager and an outside consultant. What came out of these conversations was a more nuanced view of the SAP support issue and an increased focus on the quality of support rather than the pricing. Throughout the rest of this blog entry, in italics, I will feature additional comments from the first technical manager I spoke with upon his review of this piece, his comments are in italics. The other individual, an SAP consultant, offered a couple other comments I will post underlined just to keep everything distinct.

Here’s the first comment from our technical manager:

"Let’s start with the terminology. Note that “Enterprise Support” should be called “Enterprise Software Maintenance and Support” since support includes patches, bug fixes, enhancements, support packs, as well as access to help desk contacts. Given that SAP required many long-term customers to repurchase their main product (let’s just call it “R/3”) instead of being given this code under existing contract terms, those customers might already be leery of machinations to increase SAP’s revenue with little or no effort on SAP’s part."

Following are some additional lessons (and suggestions) I took from these SAP support conversations:

For the hands-on SAP manager, the price of support is a concern to be left to others in the business. What concerns the hands-on manager is not so much the price of SAP’s support but the quality. On this topic, I was presented with a series of support anecdotes that indicated to me that - at least in the view of these managers - getting good support from SAP requires the same kind of advocacy, determination, and follow-through that most of us are used to drawing upon when we attempt to obtain support from large companies. Anecdotes included the usual things, such as misunderstood or improperly routed problems, or prematurely closed tickets. The conclusion I took from this: SAP needs to remember that compromising on the cost of Enterprise Support is not going to be effective unless the support itself also receives high marks.

"SAP software notes passed the 1 million mark in November 2006. While many have been withdrawn or obsoleted, that is a huge number of fixes, corrections and error reports. Oracle, on the other hand, allows customers (limited) access to their bug database itself, which has over 7,000,000 entries. SAP customers are not allowed to view internal messages between support personnel on customer tickets, much less view actual bug reports. They can only view these SAP Notes, formerly called OSS Notes."

I hope that these topics help to round out the SAP support discussion. I don’t claim to have all the answers, but as someone with a stake in the SAP community, I have a vested interest in seeing this dialogue move in a constructive direction.

This level of customer frustration will lead to one of two directions: less market success for SAP, or, an opportunity to improve the customer relationship. If SAP takes the latter direction, it will either have to: revoke the price increase (something Howlett continues to persuasively advocate), or justify the price increase by providing additional value. SAP seems to be opting for the latter approach, both in terms of spreading out the cost of support and working to better relay the value of Enterprise Support to its customer base. The lesson of this blog post is that if SAP relies on Solution Manager to carry the day here, it likely won’t be enough. A well-rounded conversation, one that includes the human element of support, as well as the creative use of collaborative tools such as SCN and dashboards to improve support quality, has real potential.