SAP customers are working through several commercial decisions at the same time. Mainstream maintenance for most ECC systems ends on 31 December 2027. RISE with SAP has been restructured as SAP Cloud ERP, and several tools that used to come bundled are now licensed separately. Joule and SAP’s AI agents bring their own consumption model, and SAP audits still focus heavily on how users are licensed.

This guide brings together ITAA’s articles on SAP licensing and commercial strategy. It starts with your license position, since every other SAP decision depends on it, then moves through audits, the ECC deadline, S/4HANA, cloud contracts, platform and AI costs, and negotiation. Each section summarizes the main points and links to the full articles.

1. Know your SAP license position

Most SAP cost and compliance problems come from a gap between what your contracts say and how your systems are actually used. Two pieces of work close that gap. A Bill of Materials (BoM) records what you have bought across on-premise and cloud contracts. An Effective License Position (ELP) compares those entitlements with measured usage. You’ll see both in most of the case studies in this guide, whether the trigger was an audit, a renewal or a migration.

User licensing is usually where the largest gaps sit. When SAP user access management drives cost and risk covers the common causes: inactive users still holding paid licenses, accounts left behind after mergers and divestitures, cloned roles carrying far more authorizations than anyone needs, and technical users consuming expensive license types. It recommends an Access Health Check to find these issues and move users to lower-cost license types where their activity allows.

Role design matters as much as user counts. A hidden authorization object inside a composite role can push a user into a Professional classification, and so can access in a secondary system once SAP aggregates users across systems. Both came up in a December 2025 review for a global medical technology manufacturer with tens of thousands of users and thousands of largely undocumented technical roles (Reducing SAP license risk in a global manufacturing company).

Right-sizing SAP roles and authorizations explains how to tie every role to a documented business purpose and how to record the segregation of duties conflicts you can’t remove. It also notes that SAP now uses its STAR (S/4HANA Trusted Authorization Review) dataset in audits and has built it into SAM4U. For organizations that want this handled continuously, ITAA’s SAP User Managed Service combines user management software, process review and ongoing monitoring.

Indirect and digital access

Indirect access is when people or systems use the SAP digital core through non-SAP software, without logging in to SAP directly. After the 2017 SAP v Diageo ruling, SAP introduced Digital Access pricing in 2018, which licenses the documents created in SAP instead of named users. Document types carry different multipliers, from 1.0 for sales, purchase and invoice documents down to 0.2 for financial and time management documents. SAP indirect access, digital access and the DAAP explains how the model works, how to measure document volumes, and how the Digital Access Adoption Program discounted first-time purchases.

2. Prepare for an SAP audit

The SAP audits covered in our articles mostly turn on users: who has access, which license type they hold and whether the evidence supports it. Preparing before a notice arrives gives you far more room than responding after it.

From audit shock to strategy: turning SAP user risk into value (January 2026) describes a Fortune 500 organization with more than 30,000 employees whose initial SAP audit estimate showed over $16 million in potential Named User non-compliance. The causes were duplicate and inactive users, license types that didn’t match user activity, and missing documentation for custom roles. By addressing them proactively, the client avoided the full exposure and cut a further $3 million from its projected RISE licensing costs ahead of migration. The article recommends running your own audit simulation: find inactive users, analyze over-assigned roles and validate the data regularly.

If the audit has already started, the response depends on evidence. In Avoiding a €2M SAP compliance exposure (January 2026), SAP’s audit report found non-compliance in a single product worth approximately €2 million. ITAA refreshed the client’s BoM, reviewed its contracts with a focus on dual-use rights across ECC and S/4HANA, built an ELP and reconciled it against SAP’s findings. SAP accepted that the client was not in breach and did not issue an invoice. The article’s practical advice:

• Ask for the audit date to be deferred if you need more time
• Check that users are allocated to the right license types
• Review your contract for any limits on SAP’s audit rights
• Check whether any licensing metrics have changed
• Use SAP Notes to confirm what is in scope

3. Plan for the end of ECC maintenance

SAP S/4HANA 2026: deadlines, credits and customer risk sets out the maintenance timeline:

Extended maintenance typically adds around 2% to ECC support fees and 4% for S/4HANA. The same article flags that many Compatibility Pack usage rights were due to expire in May 2026 (SAP Note 2269324), so if you still run Compatibility Pack functionality on ECC, check your rights now.

For organizations with large, complex landscapes that need more time, SAP also offers a private edition transition option, available between 2031 and 2033. Whichever route you take, the article recommends using any extra time to clear technical debt, since each year of delay makes the move more expensive. The EU commitments below also make third-party support a more practical option for parts of an ECC estate.

The EU decision on SAP support

On 9 July 2026, the European Commission accepted legally binding commitments from SAP and closed its investigation into how SAP sells maintenance and support for on-premise ERP. The commitments apply globally to current and future customers for ten years. On-premise customers can now split their estate across different support providers or support levels, end support for licenses they no longer use, terminate licenses in defined circumstances such as divestitures, and return to SAP support without the fees previously charged to returning customers.

What the EU’s decision on SAP support means for on-premise customers explains what this changes in practice. Its view is that the commitments give ECC customers more commercial flexibility without changing the technology decision. For some organizations that supports staying on ECC longer, and for others it strengthens their hand in negotiations. The article recommends reviewing your license estate for unused licenses, including third-party support in your maintenance assessment, and writing the commitments into future contract terms.

4. Choose your S/4HANA path

Moving from ECC to S/4HANA on-premise usually runs through contract conversion, where SAP credits part of your existing investment toward S/4HANA. That credit is shrinking. The cap on conversion credit fell from 80% in 2023 to 70% in 2024 and 60% in 2025, with around 50% expected for 2026. As an example, a customer moving from $1,000,000 in ECC maintenance to $1,200,000 in S/4HANA maintenance would, at a 50% cap, receive a $600,000 credit and pay $600,000 net (SAP S/4HANA 2026: deadlines, credits and customer risk).

The same article recommends checking Compatibility Pack dependencies first, choosing the transition path that fits how the business actually runs, and getting independent advice before committing to an SAP-led cloud program. For the transition itself, How to approach a transition to SAP’s S/4HANA covers greenfield, brownfield and selective data transition, and the deployment models each suits. If security and compliance are part of the case, Why SAP S/4HANA is built for modern risks looks at the controls built into the platform, including SAP GRC, Enterprise Threat Detection and Read Access Logging.

The right path depends on the landscape. In October 2025, a European utilities provider we call Trivion used BoMs for S/4HANA on-premise and private cloud, and cost projections for 2024 to 2029, to settle its deployment model and migration timing (Assessing the prime S/4HANA migration strategy for a leading utilities provider).

5. Understand RISE with SAP and SAP Cloud ERP contracts

RISE with SAP was rebranded as SAP Cloud ERP in April 2025 (SAP S/4HANA 2026: deadlines, credits and customer risk), and the entitlements changed with it. SAP replaced the Base, Premium and Premium Plus editions with SAP Cloud ERP Private “Core”, Base and tailored options. Joule, AI Units, SAP Datasphere and sustainability tools were removed from the default bundles and are now licensed separately, and entitlements such as SAP Build access and HANA Cloud capacity scale with the number of Full Use Equivalents (FUEs) you buy. SAP entitlements unpacked: navigating the 2025 RISE with SAP changes explains why you should check every entitlement against your order form instead of assuming it’s still included.

Public cloud pricing works differently again, with Business Suite User Packages priced per user per month by function. Examples range from $18 for Core HR to $2,420 for Strategic Procurement (SAP S/4HANA 2026: deadlines, credits and customer risk).

Service levels

A 99.7% availability commitment still allows more than 26 hours of downtime a year, and 99.9% allows almost nine. SAP SLAs: availability, accountability and risk looks at what sits behind the headline figure: exclusions that stop an outage counting against the SLA, the shared responsibility model between SAP, the hyperscaler and you, and service credits that are capped and usually applied to future invoices. It also covers disaster recovery, recovery time objectives and recovery point objectives, which often matter more to business risk than the availability percentage.

Integration and the SAP API Policy

SAP’s updated API Policy doesn’t change your license rights. It sets out which integration practices SAP supports and how it will enforce them. Published APIs, your own APIs in the customer namespace and compliant middleware remain supported. Non-published APIs, uncontrolled AI or agentic access, and large-scale data extraction outside approved architectures are restricted. SAP monitors API metadata such as volume and frequency, without looking at business data, and enforcement is progressive, starting with engagement and moving to throttling if needed. SAP API Policy: RISE implications compares what this means for RISE and non-RISE customers.

Regulated industries and data sovereignty

If you operate under GxP, SAP’s GxP add-on is priced as a percentage of net recurring fees, so the discount you negotiate on the base subscription also reduces the GxP cost. SAP and GxP: how they align in regulated environments covers the validation, audit trail and electronic signature requirements. For public sector and other organizations with data residency requirements, SAP cloud data sovereignty solutions compares SAP’s sovereign cloud options by region. The EU Access Only option alone can add up to 15% to standard cloud fees.

6. Control BTP and Clean Core costs

SAP’s Clean Core strategy moves custom functionality out of the ERP core and onto SAP Business Technology Platform (BTP). SAP positions this as a route to faster upgrades. Commercially, it can turn one-time development costs into recurring subscription fees, which can include BTP subscription and consumption charges, SAP Build Process Automation licenses and API usage costs. Some organizations end up paying twice, once for core ERP functionality under RISE and again for an equivalent rebuilt in BTP. Understanding the cost impact of SAP’s Clean Core strategy explains where to look for these costs.

How you buy BTP affects what you pay. The BTP Enterprise Agreement uses annual prepaid credits, pay-as-you-go has no minimum commitment and suits pilots, and subscriptions fit predictable workloads. Key 2025 considerations for SAP Business Technology Platform covers each model and why accurate forecasting in the BTP Cockpit matters before you commit.

7. Govern SAP AI: Joule, agents and AI Units

Joule is SAP’s AI copilot, a conversational interface across SAP applications that runs on BTP. It works within each user’s existing authorizations, so it doesn’t bypass security. Over-provisioned roles do become easier to spot once users start asking broad conversational questions. SAP Joule explained: what an AI copilot really adds to SAP recommends checking Joule against your licensing position, role design and logging before a wide rollout.

SAP licenses AI in two tiers. Base AI is included with SAP cloud applications. Premium AI, which covers advanced Joule capabilities and AI agents, can be licensed per user per month or on a consumption basis, depending on the capability. Consumption is measured in AI Units, which can be shared across SAP solutions, are bought annually and expire after 12 months if unused. At Sapphire 2026, SAP announced the Autonomous Enterprise, combining Joule Work, SAP Autonomous Suite and SAP Business AI Platform. It’s designed for modular adoption, so a contained first deployment can grow into a much larger commercial footprint. SAP’s Autonomous Enterprise: what does it mean for licensing and cost? lists the questions to answer before you buy AI capacity, including which capabilities consume AI Units and how you’ll track consumption against what you’ve purchased.

As agents start carrying out work inside business processes, someone has to own them. Who is governing your SAP AI agents? covers who can deploy an agent, what it can access, how its activity and consumption are monitored, and why SAP AI belongs inside your wider SAM and commercial governance.

8. Negotiate SAP renewals and new agreements

The largest result in this guide came from a negotiation prepared a year in advance. In June 2026, a US energy utility with revenues above $7 billion was finalizing a five-year RISE agreement. It had already completed a BoM, an ELP and cost modeling, and brought ITAA in to run the negotiation: a strategy and timeline, a playbook, commercial benchmarking and weekly reviews over the year before the deadline. SAP’s initial proposal was over $129 million. The agreement closed at approximately $53 million, a 59% reduction (SAP RISE negotiation delivers $76M commercial improvement).

Renewals of existing cloud contracts carry their own risks. Maximizing value in SAP S/4HANA Cloud contract renewals covers the common mistakes, including auto-renewal with price increases, no visibility of actual usage, and paying for more than you use. In March 2026, Quantisync, a global financial services organization with a renewal worth around €15 million, used a BoM, an ELP and total cost of ownership modeling to secure a multi-year agreement below market average rates while keeping its existing licensing structure.

Benchmarking doesn’t have to take long. In October 2025, a European utilities company we call Novextur needed to know whether SAP’s proposed SuccessFactors pricing was competitive before signing. ITAA and JNC delivered a benchmarking report in one working day showing the discount was below market average for its size and spend. Novextur reduced its five-year SAP spend by £1.8 million, a 12% saving (Transforming SuccessFactors agreement for a leading utilities company).

On-premise customers approaching a renewal should also bring the EU commitments into the discussion (see section 3).

9. SAP case studies

• SAP RISE negotiation delivers $76M commercial improvement (June 2026): US energy utility, SAP proposal reduced from over $129 million to approximately $53 million
• Maximizing value in SAP S/4HANA Cloud contract renewals (March 2026): Quantisync, €15 million SAP cloud renewal
• From audit shock to strategy (January 2026): Fortune 500 organization, $16 million Named User audit exposure avoided
• Avoiding a €2M SAP compliance exposure (January 2026): Northbridge, SAP took no action after the audit response
• Reducing SAP license risk in a global manufacturing company (December 2025): medical technology manufacturer, Professional license over-assignment
• Assessing the prime S/4HANA migration strategy for a leading utilities provider (October 2025): Trivion, S/4HANA deployment and timing decision
• Transforming SuccessFactors agreement for a leading utilities company (October 2025): Novextur, £1.8 million saved over five years
• ITAA facilitates global manufacturer in S/4HANA contract migration decision (April 2024): Apex Industries, 63% off initial expenses
• How our S/4HANA license migration evaluation saved over $3m (June 2021): Nitron, migration timing and decommissioning

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