The EU Just Handed SAP On-Premise Customers a Win. Here’s What It Actually Means for SAP Customers.

For decades, SAP’s on-premise maintenance and support policies have operated like a financial trap: easy to walk into, but nearly impossible to escape without paying a steep price. On July 9, 2026, the European Commission changed that. In a landmark antitrust settlement, SAP agreed to a binding package of commitments that will reshape the economics of on-premise support for its entire global customer base for the next ten years.

For the thousands of enterprises still running SAP ECC and on-premise S/4HANA, this ruling is one of the most commercially significant developments in SAP’s history, and understanding its full implications is essential before your next renewal, negotiation, or migration decision.

How SAP Ended Up in the European Commission’s Crosshairs

In September 2025, the European commission opened a formal investigation into SAP. They were concerned that the German-based software company may have restricted competition from third-party maintenance and support providers of SAP’s on-premise ERP software, and that its practices were amounted to unfair trading conditions.

The investigation centered on four distinct practices suspected of violating Article 102 of the Treaty on the Functioning of the European Union, which prohibits the abuse of a dominant position that affects trade or restricts competition within the EU. The four practices under investigation were:

1. Forced Bundling of Maintenance and Support — SAP requires customers to purchase all maintenance and support services exclusively from SAP, at the same price and under the same terms, across their entire on-premise ERP landscape. This effectively prevents customers from “mixing and matching” services and suppliers to optimize cost and coverage.
2. Inability to Terminate Support for Unused Licenses — as a general practice, SAP prohibits customers from canceling maintenance and support for software licenses they no longer actively use, leaving customers paying for unwanted services.
3. Punitive Reinstatement and Back-Maintenance Fees — customers who left SAP’s support and later sought to return were charged steep reinstatement and back-maintenance fees, effectively penalizing customers for exercising their right to seek alternative support.

What SAP Agreed To And Why It Matters

On July 9^th, the European Commission closed its antitrust investigation in exchange for SAP’s agreement to implement the following commitments globally for all current and future SAP on-premise software customers for the next ten years:

1.     Support Diversification Flexibility

SAP will allow customers to divide their on-premise SAP landscape, enabling selection of different maintenance and support providers, support levels, or no support for each part of their environment.

This directly addresses the forced bundling concern and gives customers the flexibility to mix and match support levels and providers across their SAP landscape. In the past, the all-or-nothing bundling approach deterred customers from exploring cheaper alternatives, as many customers were not willing to reduce support levels across their entire environment or hand mission-critical components to a different provider. The ability to split the landscape by product or module removes that barrier for the first time.

2.     License Termination Rights for Specific Scenarios

SAP will permit customers to terminate licenses and associated maintenance fees in the following circumstances:

• Products in their final maintenance stage, where SAP provides reduced services
• Failed implementation projects where SAP bears responsibility for the failure
• Customer insolvency or bankruptcy
• Workforce reductions of 10% or more over two years, allowing a proportional 10% reduction in licenses and maintenance costs
• Business divestitures, giving customers the ability to transfer, partially transfer, or terminate licenses depending on the buyer’s needs

This is a surprisingly generous concession given how rigid SAP has been on shelfware adjustments. Historically, SAP would only entertain shelfware reductions in exchange for strategic new purchases like RISE, leaving customers without near-term roadmap investments to absorb the cost with no recourse. Business downturn relief was an extremely rare contractual clause, and companies in urgent need were required to submit formal written requests subject to SAP’s case-by-case review and approval.

The termination right for products in final maintenance stages is also a meaningful and fair concession. Reduced service plans such as, yet deliver materially less: no new support packages, no updates for legal changes, and minimal technology updates. Customers should not be paying full price for a diminished service.

Perhaps most notably, divestiture and assignment rights have historically been absent from standard SAP agreements. SAP’s General Terms and Conditions typically prohibit customers from assigning, delegating, or transferring the agreement, or any of its rights or obligations, to any party without SAP’s prior written consent. These rights have required negotiation via contract amendment, with outcomes heavily dependent on a company’s leverage and relationship with SAP. Granting customers standardized divestiture terms and license assignment rights is a genuine and significant win for the broader SAP customer community.

SAP will broaden access to single-metric contracts, which provide an alternative basis for calculating license fees, and by extension, the maintenance fees derived from them. This will give more customers access to a simpler, more transparent, and potentially more favorable cost structure.

Where multi-metric contracts allow SAP to argue under-licensing across multiple dimensions simultaneously, a single-metric framework narrows that exposure and gives customers a cleaner foundation for commercial negotiations and true-ups.

What’s interesting is that the move to broaden access to single-metric contracts for on-premise deals is opposite to what SAP is working to achieve in the cloud, which is to shift the seat-based licensing model towards a consumption and outcome-based licensing model. This includes a near-term goal to grow consumption-based revenue to more than 30% of total cloud revenue by 2030.

4.     Clarification of Initial Contract Terms

SAP will clarify the contractual language around the initial license term during which support cannot be terminated and will stop restarting that term each time a customer purchases an additional license. This practice effectively extended lock-in periods indefinitely, as each incremental purchase reset the clock on termination rights. Closing this loophole removes a commercial mechanism that has worked quietly against customers for years.

5.     No Reinstatement Fees and Reduced Back-Maintenance Fees

SAP will eliminate administrative fees entirely for customers returning to SAP support after a period of absence. Back-maintenance fees will be capped at the lower of six months or 50% of what would have been owed during the absence.

SAP’s reinstatement and back-maintenance fee policies have historically been buried across multiple contract documents, vague, difficult to locate, and even harder to challenge. Under SAP’s Enterprise Support Schedule, if a customer terminates SAP Enterprise Support and later requests reinstatement, “SAP will invoice Licensee the accrued SAP Enterprise Support Fees associated with such time period plus a reinstatement fee.” In practice, that reinstatement fee often ran 10–20% above the back-maintenance amount, sometimes higher.

Together, these fees created a powerful, deliberate deterrent against exploring third-party support providers, who offer comparable support at roughly half SAP’s standard 22% annual maintenance fee. The prospect of paying back-maintenance fees plus a reinstatement penalty made switching to third-party support and returning to SAP financially unviable for most customers, locking them into SAP’s maintenance ecosystem regardless of the value they were receiving. Removing this barrier fundamentally changes the calculus on third-party support.

6.     Internal Clearing Structure

SAP will establish a formal internal complaint-handling structure that customers can access when they believe SAP is failing to apply the commitments, providing an accountability mechanism backed by independent oversight and enforceable by the European Commission.

All six commitments are legally binding and monitored by an independent trustee. Failure to comply gives the European Commission the authority to impose financial penalties on SAP without first proving a separate antitrust infringement.

What Happens Next: 5 Downstream Impacts Customers Should Watch

The European Commission’s ruling is a meaningful win for SAP’s on-premise customer base, but it does not exist in a vacuum. Customers should approach these changes with eyes wide open, understanding both the opportunities and the broader commercial dynamics they introduce.

1.     Expect Migration Pressure to Soften, But SAP Will Find New Levers

One of SAP’s most effective levers for driving cloud migration has been the pressure created by ECC’s 2027 mainstream maintenance deadline and the high cost of remaining on-premise. SAP’s commitments materially reduce that pressure.

Customers who previously felt financially compelled to migrate, either to avoid rising maintenance costs or to escape the shelfware trap, now have a more viable path to optimizing their on-premise costs without migrating. Of the estimated 35,000 total ECC customers globally, more than a third were projected to remain on ECC by 2030. That figure may now be higher.

Customers with heavily customized landscapes and no compelling business case to migrate will find the economics of staying on-premise considerably more attractive, and SAP’s account teams will need to work harder to make the case for RISE without financial coercion that previously did much of that work for them.

Expect SAP to respond with new and more compelling cloud incentives. At Sapphire 2026, SAP announced that on-premise customers can access limited AI capabilities by committing at least 50% of their maintenance spending to the cloud. This is a clear signal that SAP’s strategy is to make the cloud increasingly attractive rather than simply making on-premise increasingly costly. More announcements of this nature are likely ahead of the 2027 ECC deadline.

2.     Exercising Your Rights Could Change How SAP Treats You

Although SAP publicly welcomed the EC’s decision and reaffirmed its commitment to open competition and customer choice, on-premise maintenance remains its second largest revenue stream at roughly 29% of total revenue. Customers should consider how exercising these new rights may affect their broader commercial relationship with SAP. Reducing or redirecting maintenance spend diminishes SAP’s recurring revenue from your account, and that shift can have consequences.

Customers who reduce their SAP maintenance footprint may find themselves reclassified to a lower account tier, with reduced access to executive sponsorship, innovation programs, and strategic partnership opportunities. SAP may also harden its stance on audits and compliance reviews, become less flexible in commercial negotiations, and deprioritize the account in cloud migration incentives. The rights granted are real and should be exercised but do so with a clear understanding of the downstream relationship implications and a deliberate strategy for managing the SAP account dynamic.

3.     Watch the Cloud for the Behaviors the EC Just Banned On-Premise

SAP’s commitments apply exclusively to on-premise maintenance and support practices, cloud offerings are explicitly outside the scope of the ruling. With on-premise maintenance now more vulnerable to customer defection, a legitimate question emerges: will SAP attempt to offset that revenue pressure through more restrictive commercial terms in its cloud agreements?

Customers evaluating RISE with SAP or SAP’s broader cloud portfolio should scrutinize their cloud contracts for provisions that mirror the behaviors the EC just prohibited on-premise, including restrictive termination clauses, punitive exit terms, and the absence of divestiture or assignment rights. The structural patterns that defined SAP’s on-premise support model could, over time, replicate themselves in the cloud if customers do not push back proactively.

4.     Third-Party Support Is Now a More Viable Option But Go In With Clear Expectations

The removal of punitive reinstatement fees dramatically lowers the risk of engaging third-party support providers. This is great news for third party software support providers such as Rimini Street and Spinnaker Support, some of which offer support coverage for SAP ECC 6.0 and S/4HANA releases through 2040 at approximately half SAP’s 22% annual maintenance rate.

However, customers should do their due diligence before committing. Third-party support does not include access to new software updates, patches, or bug fixes issued after the customer transitions off SAP support. If a new patch or update is required, only SAP can provide it; third-party vendors do not have access to SAP’s proprietary source code. For customers planning to remain on ECC long-term with stable, well-understood landscapes, the trade-off is often acceptable. For customers who may eventually migrate to RISE or S/4HANA, it requires more careful scenario planning.

5.     The Negotiating Window Is Open But It Won’t Stay That Way

The time of maximum leverage created by this ruling is now. SAP’s account teams are aware of the new commitments and will be adapting their commercial playbooks accordingly, but customers who act during this period of transition, before SAP recalibrates its negotiating posture, are best positioned to extract the most value.

Customers approaching maintenance renewals, RISE evaluations, or broader SAP commercial discussions in the next 12–18 months should explicitly reference these commitments as part of their negotiating strategy, pushing for landscape-splitting rights, shelfware relief, single-metric contracts, and transparent initial term provisions to be formally incorporated into their agreements. The EC did not just change SAP’s support policies, it shifted the commercial power dynamic between SAP and its customers, and that shift should be reflected in every SAP negotiation that follows.

The Bottom Line

The European Commission’s ruling is a landmark moment for SAP’s on-premise customer base, and its implications extend well beyond the six commitments SAP has agreed to. For the first time in SAP’s history, the financial architecture that kept customers captive to SAP’s maintenance ecosystem has been dismantled by regulatory force. The playing field is more level today than it was a week ago.

But level playing fields still require players who know the rules. The customers who will benefit most from this ruling are not those who simply wait for SAP to apply the new policies; they are the ones who understand the commitments in detail, engage their SAP account teams proactively, and incorporate the new commercial landscape into their negotiating strategy before SAP adapts its playbook.

The ruling does not eliminate SAP’s commercial complexity. It creates new room to navigate it. Use that room wisely.

Not sure how these new rights apply to your SAP agreement? UpperEdge’s SAP Commercial Advisory practice can help you build a negotiation strategy around SAP’s commitments. Reach out today to learn how we can help.