A client of mine has ordered some extra licences via their support partner, who have in turn raised the request with SAP. All they need is the key to give them 10 concurrent users. However, the weeks are going by and SAP are not coming up with the goods.
I would like to hear your good and bad stories of requesting new licences for existing installations - is this the new normal? Have SAP always been tardy? If they were asking for a big number would the experience be better?
What you are experiencing is par for the course and has been for years. We always tell our customers to never assign dates to break ground on any new installations or upgrades until you have all necessary keycodes in hand. We also tell maintenance paying customers to request new keycodes the moment they even think they might want to perform an upgrade.
I’ve been on an upgrade project that was delayed by five weeks because we couldn’t get all of the required keycodes. I’ve spoken with organizations that proceeded with 4.1 - 4.2 upgrades with temp keycodes that expired and left them dead in the water because their account rep assured them they would have new production keycodes in a couple of days.
Hi, thank you for that, it makes me feel a little better. In the meantime, the third party supplier has come back to us and said a very similar thing. So maybe the client is not getting a new licence key for Christmas!
Depending on how your bought your keys (i.e. OEM, VAR) the options are different. OEM partners generate keys on the customers behalf (i.e. I do a few of ours) but licenses bought VAR the keys can be generated by the customer on the SAP support portal as long as they have a valid S-User ID which they should have.
In this case it has been handed off to SAP to do. Interesting that you mention S-Ids though as that is another bone of contention between the client and the supplier. They have some, but they basically can do nothing other than search the knowledge base.
Wow, so the client finally gets some licences but they are for Enterprise not Edge…so back round they go…get some licences…grovelling apology from SAP…and they’re Standard instead of Professional…whatever those tags mean…back round they go again, contact the grovelling apologist and…nothing.
In the latest update, SAP have issued the client an emergency licence key while “Issues at SAP’s end” are sorted out. A poor experience. That key expires in 3 weeks…They must be feeling very confident!
Our situation is a bit different, because as a partners we do not do only development, but also we sell SAP licenses and we have good relationships with SAP in general, so i cannot judge about your case.
All i know, that SAP is now trying to audit customers more frequently, this applies on customers with old licensing model - CPU and NUL licenses (mostly Enterprise version of software) and in dozens of cases they find leaks how licenses are used.
Some times SAP is acting like an as*holes and trying to ruin our license business as well, by selling the software directly even avoiding us, but in these scenarios are very rare … but they are
Now some more emergency keys which last in to the middle of April. One of the problems here is because there is a third party in the middle, there is no account manager whose life can be made unpleasant until some progress is made. An argument for going direct with SAP? Hmm, I am not so sure.
…and we’re still waiting for permanent keys from SAP. The client’s temp keys are about to expire so they will be getting another set of temporary keys while SAP do whatever it is necessary to actually get these keys.
(BOB member since 2002-08-15)
(BOB member since 2006-02-08)