On 9 July 2026, the European Commission accepted and made legally binding a set of commitments offered by SAP on the maintenance and support of its on-premise business management software. Ten years, worldwide, for all current and future customers.
You received no letter. Nothing obliges a software vendor to tell its customers that their rights have just expanded.
What SAP committed to do
Eight commitments appear in the Commission’s press release. Four of them change something for a company of 20 to 200 people.
Split up your estate. SAP must clarify the conditions under which you can split your installation into several parts and choose, for each one, a different maintenance provider, a different support level with SAP, or no maintenance at all. This is the end of the all-or-nothing rule.
Terminate in five specific situations. Products that have reached the final maintenance stage, where SAP provides only a reduced service. An implementation project that failed through SAP’s fault. Customer insolvency or liquidation. A workforce reduction of 10 % or more over two years. Divestment of a business unit, with licence transfer to the buyer, partial transfer, or full termination if the buyer does not need them.
Leave without paying the price of return. Reactivation fees are abolished. Retroactive maintenance fees, the ones that billed you the backlog as if you had never left, are reduced.
Stop the initial term from resetting to zero. SAP must clarify the clauses on the initial period during which you cannot terminate support, and refrain from restarting a new period every time you purchase an additional licence. This was the mechanism that made some contracts perpetually non-terminable.
Added to this: broader access to single-metric contracts, which change the basis for calculating fees, and an internal appeal structure at SAP for when you believe the commitments are being misapplied.
Why this is not just a matter for lawyers
The Commission had identified four practices liable to restrict competition on the market for maintenance of SAP’s on-premise software: preventing termination of maintenance on unused licences, charging reactivation and retroactivity fees sometimes equivalent to what a customer would have paid by staying, systematically extending the initial licence term, and imposing the same maintenance at the same price across the entire estate.
These four practices share one thing in common. None of them concerned the price of the software. All of them concerned your ability to leave. That is where the cost was hiding, and that is where the decision acts.
What this does not cover
The cloud. Subscriptions hosted by SAP fall outside the scope of the decision. If your migration is already done, this decision no longer concerns you, and that is information to factor into the calculation of a future migration.
Another vendor. None of this applies automatically to Microsoft, Oracle, Salesforce, or your line-of-business software vendor. The Commission itself states that these commitments serve as a benchmark for the sector, which is not the same thing as an obligation.
What you do this week
Pull out your SAP maintenance contract and its pricing schedule. Three things to identify: the renewal date, the length of the notice period, and the wording that describes the scope of licences covered.
Then count your paid licences against your actually used licences. That gap is the subject of the conversation, and it is worth the corresponding annual maintenance amount.
The conversation to open is not a request for a commercial discount. It is a request to align your contract with the commitments made before the Commission. It is not handled at the same level, because the penalty for non-compliance is a fine of up to 10 % of SAP’s worldwide turnover, plus a periodic penalty payment of 5 % of daily turnover for each day of non-compliance.
If SAP misapplies these commitments, two avenues of recourse exist outside your sales contact: the internal appeal structure created by SAP, and the independent trustee tasked with monitoring compliance with the commitments, who reports regularly to the Commission.
The sentence to remember
A competition decision refunds you nothing. It gives you a right, and a right you don’t exercise costs you the price of silence.
Sources
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Commission accepts binding commitments by SAP to address competition concerns about services for its popular business management software · Commission européenne, 9 July 2026
Licence: CC BY 4.0 · Communiqué IP/26/1554 du 9 juillet 2026, affaire AT.40823. Politique de réutilisation de la Commission mise en œuvre par la décision 2011/833/UE : sauf mention contraire, les contenus détenus par l'Union sont sous licence CC BY 4.0, réutilisation commerciale comprise, avec attribution et indication des modifications. Le texte intégral des engagements est publié au registre public des affaires sous le numéro AT.40823, et il prévaut sur ce communiqué.