On Monday May 6th, SAP announced its time-bound Digital Access Adoption Program (DAAP) with financial incentives for customers who choose to proactively license their Indirect Access on the basis of their business-document consumption.

What do you need to know about DAAP?

The Digital Access Adoption Program (DAAP) is valid for one year and guarantees no back-maintenance will be due as part of the program. DAAP offers a 2-step approach that begins with (1) measuring your document consumption rates and (2) choosing a financial incentive either covering 100% of your current document consumption at a 90% discount, or purchasing at least 115% for your current document consumption plus growth. Customers will have to calculate which scenario best suits their needs.

What are the Gotchas?

While these discounts are tempting, you need to consider the options for measurability. Customers can either work with SAP’s Global License Audit and Compliance Group (GLAC) — which still relies on SAP’s flawed estimation note — or install SAP’s Passport Tool which (supposedly) adds accurate detection of documents created via 3rd party applications, but: the tool is already delayed, will initially only be available for the most current versions of ECC, and only starts counting documents from the time of installation — so it won’t give you an immediate and accurate annualized estimate either.

Please note that these discounts only apply to the initial purchase of documents, which is a perpetual license, and won’t apply to your annual maintenance which is based on SAP’s List Prices.

SAP also confirmed that EDI communication is considered Indirect Access. If you already performed your own investigation of the financial impact of Indirect Access at your organization, your results are most likely too conservative if EDI was not considered.

Finally, the topic of Robotic Process Automation (RPA) was addressed, as non-human use falls under SAP’s definition of what constitutes Digital Access. This confirms that all non-SAP RPA solutions integrated with ECC or S/4HANA will create additional licensing demands for customers.

What should you do now?

We believe that DAAP is an opportunity for customers to compliantly license their Indirect Access once and for all — the difficulty is in the right approach to ensure that you are actually receiving the maximum benefit from the program.

What will happen once the program expires in May of 2020? It’s hard to say — but given SAP’s strategic use of its audit machinery, future non-compliance penalties are expected for customers that continue to ignore SAP’s efforts to transition its customer base over to its Digital Access model.