Loophole in SAP licensing

Rewards for Action By 23rd March 2012 – But Why Now? SAP is moving its enterprise license model for its Business Objects analytics software to a Concurrent Session Based suite. Whilst the newly released concurrent model provides a high degree of flexibility for deployment to a community of users there is currently a more cost effective model that benefits existing ERP customers because they can use their existing investment in their ERP named user licenses to access Business Objects content. The new SAP licensing was formulated and released in Q4 2011 but there is an "intermediate" model, known as BI Package, which is still in place for now but due to be taken off the price list at the end of March 2012. This means that an ERP customer can purchase the server engine component of this model and automatically have the rights to deploy BI content to their existing user base.

How would an ERP customer benefit from BI Package?

Until the end of March 2012 any ERP customer, who already has a mixed estate of Limited Professional, Professional and Expert user licenses for their ERP platform, CAN use these as the end user component for Business Objects. All they would need to purchase would be the server engine component. By purchasing the server engine component of the BI Package you can take advantage of all the functionality of the complete suite of Enterprise Business Objects tools:

These include:

Dashboards
Web Intelligence
Explorer (business users exploring data sets without needing to know any query language)
Crystal Reports
Live Office (embedding refreshable BI content in MS Office templates and documents)
OLAP Analysis
Mobile (deploying BI content to mobile devices)
BI Widgets (your most used analytics pinned to your Windows desktop – updated as the data refreshes)

The Enterprise server also provides Data Federation (connection to live source content) as well as Enterprise resilience features and SAP connectivity.

What Sort of Access Would Users Get?

All you Expert licenses would allow users to perform development, design, full analysis and creation/editing of new and existing content.
Your Limited Professional and Professional users will have the ability to access BI content through Interactive Viewing (most suited to managers and occasional BI usage)

This table explains the capability in greater detail

SAP BusinessObjects BI Solution in the BI Package		View and Explore: BI Viewer User License (Interactive Viewing)	Design and Analyse: Business Analyst User License
SAP BusinessObjects Enterprise Premium	BI Platform	Access platform services	Access and administer (profiles, configuration) platform services
	SAP BusinessObjects Live Office	Integration with Microsoft Office for viewing reports, dashboards	Integration with Microsoft Office for viewing reports, dashboards; edit queries
	SAP BusinessObjects Dashboards	Customise, view personalised dashboards	Customise, view personalised dashboards
	BI Widgets	Customise, view personalised BI widgets	Customise, view personalised BI widgets
	BI Portal	Personalised user profile	Personalised user profile
Crystal Reports		View, refresh, and schedule reports	View, refresh, schedule, author, and edit reports
SAP BusinessObjects Web Intelligence		View, navigate via report map, refresh, schedule, export, zoom, sort, search, filter, track data changes, fold/unfold, use predefined input controls, drill, apply basic formatting, against a predefined report.	View and interact/explore capabilities plus full authoring and editing of analyses and queries. Ability to create and/or change report definition including: combine local files with corporate data, add calculations, query drill, define input controls, access data panel/substitute dimensions, defining hyperlinks, add/change charts/graphs
SAP BusinessObjects Dashboards		View refreshable ,interactive, dashboard models	View, and model, edit live (refreshable) models
SAP BusinessObjects OLAP Analysis		Not available	View, refresh, author, edit and analyse OLAP workbooks
SAP BusinessObjects Explorer		View and navigate data sets (Data Exploration)	View, navigate data sets (Data Exploration); Manage and create Information Spaces
SAP BusinessObjects Mobile		View BI (reports, charts) on mobile devices	View and update/edit BI (reports, charts) on mobile devices
SAP BusinessObjects Integration (SAP solutions, Oracle, PeopleSoft, JD Edwards)		View data from business applications in a report, analysis or dashboard (indirect access)	View and access business applications data to create reports/dashboards

What does this really mean?

Essentially you would only need to purchase the server component to have Enterprise Business Objects available.
It also means that if you have any ERP user licenses sat on the shelf, which you have not yet deployed, they can be utilised in a very effective way.
Think of all the annual maintenance budget that will be now creating value rather than being wasted on the off chance you need to flex your ERP user base.

If this looks to have some legs then we could talk about it in more detail and I can prepare some formal quotations. For now, I have based illustrative figures on a typical license estate of 200 named ERP users of which 60% are Limited Professional and 40% are Expert users.

How is this priced?

You can price the BI Package engine on CPU metrics, which are £67,500 per CPU. This can be deployed on a physical machine or in a VM environment. Based on a deployment using 2 CPUs (which would be a minimum standard these days) the price would be £135,000 plus normal maintenance. If you were to wait and do the same in April under the concurrent BI Suite pricing you would be expecting to pay around £360,000 + maintenance (based on 200 users) for the same functionality (varies depending on no of users but the standard will be £1800 per user).

If that wasn't Incentive Enough!

If the prospect of paying less for an Enterprise deployment wasn't enough for you then here's the other offer we have for investments made before the end of March 2012.

If you can complete an order for 2 x CPU of BI Package Server Engine before the 23rd of March 2012 we will give you a 35% discount on that figure (£135k less 35% = £87.75k plus annual maintenance of £19.3k)
If you can complete an order for 3 x CPU of BI Package Server Engine before the 23rd of March 2012 we will give you a 40% discount on that figure (£202.5k less 40% = £121.5k plus annual maintenance of £26.73k)

What to do next?

If this loop hole in the licensing looks attractive to you and you want to explore it more then let me know and we can arrange to talk or meet to go into detail and prepare a specific proposal for you.

Darren Rooney
IT Performs
Sales & Business Development Manager
07818 543 573
0845 124 9495