New SAP Digital Access Licensing

model.
 TIMELINE

• February 2017 SAP vs Diageo court judgment in the U.K favouring SAP.
• In July 2017, SAP introduced order-based pricing for order-to-cash (O2C) and procure-to-pay
(P2P) scenarios, and easing license requirements for certain read-only use cases.
• On 10 April 2018, SAP introduced its document-based pricing model.
• The new pricing model is similar to the 2017 order-based method, which SAP has now
replaced with the document-based approach and extended to address a much broader range
of indirect and digital use cases.
 ACCESS TO SAP
• SAP now views "Use" of its ERP systems as occurring in three different ways, each with
different license requirements:
• Direct human access — This is the traditional use case, where employees and business
partners log into the SAP system directly. In this case, named user licensing is typically
required. There are no changes planned for this use case.
• SAP application access — This use case represents indirect use of the SAP ERP system by way
of SAP applications such as Ariba, Concur, Fieldglass, Hybris or SuccessFactors. In this case,
no further licensing is required.
• Indirect and digital access
• Indirect access — Indirect human or nonhuman use of the ERP system by way of non-
SAP applications or interfaces, which include competitor offerings, custom-built
applications and applications created using the SAP Cloud Platform. For example, a
salesperson or customer placing an order in a non-SAP CRM application that results in a
sales order creation in the SAP ERP system.
• Digital access — Direct nonhuman use of the ERP system by devices, bots, Internet of
Things (IoT) sensors and other automated systems. For example, an artificial intelligence
(AI)-enabled software bot entering financial data into the SAP ERP system, or an IoT
sensor creating a service request in SAP.
NEW SAP DIGITAL ACCESS LICENSING MODEL.

• SAP now charges license fees for the creation of documents triggered by any non-SAP
application, device, bot or automated system.
• The Digital Access price list item is the mechanism by which to license all of that activity, with
pricing based on documents created. Other activity, such as reading, updating or deleting
documents, is excluded from the document count.
• The document count is calculated based on the annual volume of nine different document
types.
Nine Indirect and Digital Access Document Types
• According to SAP, all indirect and digital access is accounted for once the customer has
licensed for the full document count, even if other indirect or digital access use cases exist
that trigger other activity in the SAP system. For example, SAP has stated to Gartner that
indirect or digital use to create customer, vendor or asset records will not result in license
fees, as these documents/records do not fall within one of the nine document types.

• For the purposes of indirect and digital access licensing, SAP only counts new documents
created by way of a non-SAP system. For example, if an e-commerce customer places an
order in a third-party application, which then creates a sales document in SAP ERP, that
document is counted for indirect and digital access licensing purposes. However, subsequent
documents created in SAP ERP to complete that process (e.g., invoices, shipment
information, financial transactions) are not part of the document count.)

• SAP weighs the document count for some document types differently than others. SAP has
chosen to weight the document count for material documents and financial documents at
only 20% of the total number of documents created. Presumably, this is due to their greater
volume.
• For measurement, SAP is using a trust-based model that depends on self-reporting (for now),
which puts the onus on the customer to get it right. SAP states that it is "planning to provide
customers with tools to monitor and measure ERP use" later in 2018.
• SAP has only stated that the document-based pricing model has volume discounts, and that
the marginal cost per document declines as document volume grows (economies of scale).
• There is lack of clarity as SAP note contains no logic to differentiate between documents
created by SAP or by a third-party app, so to get meaningful data the note must be run on
each system for each technical user.
THANK YOU