What This Article Covers

• What is Indirect Access?
• What is the BIAA?
• How Non-SAP Vendors Struggle with Indirect Access

Introduction

• Indirect access claims have been brought with more frequency by SAP against customers than is generally known.
• Actual indirect access claims by SAP, as well as the threat of such claims, have the effect of blocking out other vendors from deals that in many cases they rightfully won.
• Indirect access claims can be brought for any system when integrated to an SAP system. This is why the discussion around “what connection to an SAP system is indirect access?” is not helpful.
• Indirect access is problematic because SAP has changed the definition of indirect access to be essentially any system being connected to SAP, as is covered in the article Type 1 Versus Type 2 Indirect Access.
• Indirect access forms an anti-competitive barrier to other vendors. This is one of the reasons that SAP is so secretive about IA and obscures in its language how IA claims are determined.

How Non-SAP Vendors Struggle with Indirect Access

With indirect access (IA), as with other things, competing with SAP is simply quite different than competing with most other vendors, and how vendors can react to this is to a great degree dependent upon their size.

• Larger Vendors: Even the largest vendors frequently lack access to information as to how SAP actually operates. Many have competitive intelligence groups, but there is a limited ability of such groups to deal with an issue like indirect access as it requires obtaining data points that are cross vendor and cross application category.
• Smaller Vendors: Smaller vendors, often don’t have anyone tracking SAP, and SAP is so complex, with so many “ins and outs” that tracking SAP is a full-time job, and requires experience with SAP and long term focus in order to make sense of.

In both large vendors and small vendors, however, it is quite common to hear things from these vendors that they assume to be true about SAP, but are in fact not true. In this way, SAP marketing concepts are used not only against SAP’s customers but against their competition. We work in and analyze SAP for a living, and can’t find an equal to SAP when it comes to providing inaccurate information about their applications. This causes losses on other software vendors.

Now, while it is quite rare to find a software vendor that is incapable in explaining its value proposition or performing quality demos to prospects, in our estimation, the number of software vendors that understand how SAP operates, the reality of their applications, and their licensing and other important elements for competing against SAP is actually quite small.

The Problem: This leaves vendors at a distinct disadvantage generally, but even more so when trying to react to something like indirect access. Indirect access is kept quite secretive by SAP, and their public statements about indirect access are more designed to obscure what they are doing with IA than illuminating.