In September 2025, the European Commission opened a formal investigation into SAP for possible abuse of a dominant position in the maintenance and support market for its on-premise ERP (case AT.40823). Two months later, facing a potential fine of up to 10% of its global revenue — more than €3.7 billion — SAP offered the Commission a package of commitments with global effect for 10 years. If approved, the rules of the game change for on-premise SAP customers worldwide, including Latin America. In this article we review the new options customers will have.
What the European Commission challenged
The European authority identified four practices that, in its preliminary assessment, restricted competition and left the customer trapped:
- The requirement to contract SAP maintenance for all on-premise ERP software.
- The requirement to choose the same type of maintenance for all of that software (the “all or nothing” principle).
- The inability to cancel maintenance on licenses the customer no longer uses.
- Retroactive reactivation fees so high that they effectively wiped out any savings achieved by contracting an alternative provider.
The combined effect was clear: even though customers owned their perpetual licenses, they had no real freedom to decide how, with whom, and at what cost to maintain them.
The three commitments SAP offered
To avoid the penalty, SAP proposed three concrete commitments to the European Commission:
- Splitting the ERP landscape. Customers will be able to divide their SAP installation into separate blocks and contract maintenance independently for each one. This breaks the “all or nothing” principle.
- A cap on restoration payments. If a company suspended maintenance and later decides to reactivate it, SAP will not be able to charge more than the lower of these two amounts: 1) 50% of the payments that would have accrued during the suspended period; or 2) six months of maintenance. The full retroactive charge — the main disincentive to leaving — ceases to exist.
- Elimination of the restoration fee. The additional charge for reactivating the service disappears.
The options now open to customers
These are the commercial windows that until now were closed to companies running SAP on-premise, and that the commitments make available:
- “Mix and match” maintenance: for the first time, a company will be able to contract an independent provider to maintain part of its installation, keeping SAP maintenance only on the modules where it truly needs it.
- Optimizing the licensed estate: companies will be able to stop paying maintenance on licenses they no longer use, without fear of disproportionate penalties if they later decide to reactivate them.
- An “open door” strategy: companies will be able to suspend maintenance during a migration, pilot or internal reorganization, knowing in advance what it would cost to resume it.
- Negotiating on more balanced terms: the mere existence of viable alternatives changes the customer’s negotiating position with SAP in renewals, audits and migration proposals.
What the commitments don’t resolve
It’s important to be clear about one thing: these commitments attack maintenance lock-in, but they don’t resolve other fronts that also concern the SAP ecosystem. The deliberate concentration of innovations — generative AI, Joule, SAP Build, Green Ledger and more than 280 exclusive features — in RISE and S/4HANA Cloud remains intact. Nor are the licensing audits used as a pressure mechanism toward migration regulated. These issues remain live, and companies running SAP on-premise should take a position on them.
A turning point for Latin American customers
For a company running SAP on-premise, the decisions made this year about maintenance, license sizing and architecture will have an impact over the next 10 years. The competitive landscape is different from 2024, and it’s worth reviewing current contracts in light of the new rights.
At Novis we’ve prepared a detailed document that explains each commitment one by one, assesses which types of companies can capture the most value from each, and provides a concrete guide for reviewing current SAP contracts. Request it here.
