SAP will extend main­stream main­te­nance on its Busi­ness Suite (and Busi­ness Suite on HANA) appli­ca­tions an addi­tion­al five years, until 2025, respond­ing to cus­tomer requests for stronger com­mit­ment to on-premise appli­ca­tions and more time to move to the cloud.

In turn, SAP won’t raise the cost of main­te­nance beyond 22% until at least 2025, and there will be no adjust­ments for infla­tion to exist­ing con­tracts until 2020, accord­ing to SAP’s Augus­to Abbarchi, glob­al head of SAP Main­te­nance Go-To-Market.

SAP also stat­ed it will con­tin­ue to sup­port its Busi­ness Suite appli­ca­tions through new Enhance­ment Pack­ages and Sup­port Packs. 

“We believe the world is going to the cloud. But we believe cus­tomers want to go to the cloud at their own pace in their own way, and we need to give them the flex­i­bil­i­ty to do that,” says Wieland Schrein­er, SVP of Cloud Suite, Prod­ucts & Inno­va­tion SAP.

Speak­ing direct­ly to ASUG mem­bers, he added that ​“we will not at all force you to go to the cloud. There is a clear com­mit­ment from SAP that you have the choice.”

This com­mit­ment was under­scored by the fact that SAP’s Sim­ple Finance appli­ca­tion will be avail­able to both SAP HANA on-premise cus­tomers, as well as its planned released in the SAP HANA Enter­prise Cloud.

There was some ques­tion as to whether SAP HANA on-premise cus­tomers would be able to take advan­tage of Sim­ple Finance. It debuted in June as an end-to-end, sub­scrip­tion-based finan­cial man­age­ment application.

In his remarks at SAP­PHIRE NOW and ASUG Annu­al Con­fer­ence in Orlan­do that month, Has­so Plat­tner piqued cus­tomer inter­est sig­nif­i­cant­ly when he announced that Sim­ple Finance would be the first of an entire suite of sim­pli­fied appli­ca­tions that lever­aged HANA’s colum­nar, in-mem­o­ry stor­age and dra­mat­i­cal­ly sim­pli­fied process­es by remov­ing the need for aggre­gates and mate­ri­al­ized tables.

The cloud does allow SAP the pos­si­bil­i­ty to inno­vate faster, Schrein­er says, so it’s pos­si­ble that new releas­es of the ​“Sim­ple” soft­ware will be avail­able to cloud cus­tomers first.

Asked whether SAP’s cloud prod­ucts could be con­sid­ered the ECC 6.0 suc­ces­sor, Schrein­er says that due to legal rea­sons relat­ing to the dif­fer­ence in how the prod­ucts are licensed, ​“the cloud can­not be a suc­ces­sor of the product.”

“But, [there was a] nat­ur­al evo­lu­tion from main­frame to client serv­er,” he says, ​“and we have the nat­ur­al sequence from client serv­er to cloud.”