SAP is raising its software maintenance fees for new customers. No surprise there. Soft maintenance fees are the life’s blood of enterprise software vendors. It’s the recurring revenue these companies can count on. Maintenance and support fees for software license(s) – whether it’s SAP, Microsoft or Oracle licensing – the average is about 20 to 25% (maybe even closer to 30% these days) of the annual net license price . Financial analysts have said that the recurring maintenance fees can account for half or more of the enterprise software company’s total revenues.
SAP is saying that the raised fees are due to the growing system complexities.