What are the major questions we need to be able to answer when starting preparations for our SAP agreement negotiation? What are the decision drivers? Here are a few key considerations.– by Gábor Hédai, IPR-Insights.

Return to perpetual. What happens if we want to get off the cloud and go back to on-premises licensing? Is there even a chance to go back, or is the cloud a one-way street? And if there is, what does the process actually look like?

What is not included? Not only is it important to understand what we are getting under S/4HANA, but it’s also a must to understand what is getting discontinued or out-scoped. By transitioning to S/4HANA, do we lose functionalities we had before? What would we miss out on? Also, do we have to pay extra for things that used to be included in our on-premises package?

Old licenses. What do we get for our old licenses? Can we exchange or convert them? Do we have shelfware to trade in and get something for our existing investment that better fits our actual needs?

Indirect-usage-related fees. Do we go down the route of the best-of-breed approach? Do we have a large number of third-party application interfaces that cause ballooning of indirect usage charges? If so, what cost the most? What should not?!

Hidden costs. What are some hidden costs we need to consider? Just think about the elements around the SAP BASIS costs, or the potential for surprise costs down the road for disaster recovery and high availability. What comes as standard and what is optional?

Hyperscaler integrity. If we choose one of the big three hyperscalers, what can we do about integrating solutions from another hyperscaler space? Think about functionality, data, and more. How can we bridge the gap between our RISE contract and the other ones? How are we going to integrate all those solutions?