SAP licensing complexities – focusing on your SAP packages

SAP licensing with a focus on your packages

Cash Management is licensed by your company’s annual revenue. The license is sold in blocks of currency, for example 1 license would cover 100 million Euros. If your company’s revenue was 500 million Euros, you would need 5 licenses. If your company’s revenue increase, so does your license requirement.

Process Control is licensed by Users. This means the number of users accessing the Package.

Real Estate Management actually has two licensing metrics depending on whether you manage residential or commercial properties. If residential, it is licensed by a rental unit or if commercial it is again licensed by User. This of course will be a different user count compared to Process Control.

In these three examples, you can see that there is quite a range of different metrics that you may own. SAP has hundreds of different metrics. Becki Riall, comments: “If you have a relatively reasonable size of the state, let’s say 15 different Packages, that means you need to measure your usage in up to 15 different ways.”

The complexity here is managing all of these different metrics and understanding how to measure them. SAP has a license audit tool, called License Administration Workbench or LAW, which measures the usage of your Named Users and Packages. The problem with this tool is that not every product can be measured automatically or reliably. This means you are only getting a part of the picture.

For some products, you might get accurate usage, but for others you might not. For example, it’s almost impossible to create a methodology that measures every organization’s revenue in a consistent way. This means that if you own a product such as Cash Management that has a Revenue metric, this would not be measured by LAW. This will require you to investigate internally in your organization and determine the usage manually. Another example is the license metric of cores. Again, the license audit tool wouldn’t measure this so you’ll need to figure out how many cores are in use for any particular product based on how SAP defines the metric.

Independent SAP licensing and support

You can also find more recent information in the following blog post: SAP Licensing and overview.

Would you like to know more about licensing in ECC or S/4HANA customers? Feel free to ask any questions or get in touch!