Of course they don't put it quite that way; instead, they are "Transitioning all customers to the Enterprise Support offering." Of course, Enterprise support is more expensive than Standard or Premium support, which are being phased out, so the effect for many users is a price hike.

In some ways I think it's more palatable to just say "We're going to raise our prices" than to try to cover it up with some gimmicky approach like this. Although I imagine it probably makes sense on SAP's side to simplify accounting and tracking on the backend, you shouldn't necessarily give customers your internal logic for such a move; that's what corporate PR is for.

Dennis Howlett cites low adoption rates in the transition program to date and believes that the move will push existing SAP Support customers to alternative support offerings such as Rimini Street, but, probably as a result of my predilection for the simplicity of such things, I imagine it will help drive businesses to SaaS alternatives. This almost certainly means away from SAP, considering the botched Business ByDesign offering that was the company's putative effort in that direction.

Of course, signing up for SaaS offerings only puts one even further at the mercy of rapacious vendors who are inclined to these sorts of shenanigans, but on the other hand, if you are tied into massive corporate software of this type anyway, then you already are at their mercy; if an outsourced approach offers any other advantages at all, then this sort of objection is rendered somewhat moot by the behavior of SAP and other industry giants determined to throw their weight around.