SAP has delayed price rises on its controversial Enterprise Support after prolonged negotiations with user groups.
Price rises were due to come into effect at the beginning of 2010, but SAP has delayed any move, while it "intensifies engagement with customers and user groups".
Support revenue in Q3 was 1.3 billion Euros, over half the company's turnover in the period.
Under user-group pressure SAP agreed to delay price rises in Enterprise Support while it agreed a series of KPIs with the global user group organisation SUGEN to illustrate clear value from the price increases.
SAP said the agreement has resulted in "significant progress in a short time frame". The company has formed a task force to "reach out to customers and user groups to continue and enhance the ongoing dialogue and incorporate their feedback in order to maximise customer value from SAP's entire support offerings."
Alan Bowling, Chairman, SAP UK and Ireland User Group, a key member of SUGEN, said, "We welcome this statement from SAP -- both in recognition of the hard work recognising value that has taken place on the benchmarking exercise, but also the consideration SAP is giving to its customers in these tough economic times.
"We've always said the benchmarking programme linking price to value, although ground breaking, was going to be a difficult process, especially in the time frames involved this year.
"As we stated at our recent conference in the UK & Ireland we are happy to see that SAP is increasing its work with customers and look forward to this developing and continuing, not just around delivering value for all enterprise support customers but across the board.
"We look forward to working further with our SAP and SUGEN colleagues in the scheduled meeting around this and other topics, in Boston, USA next week."
