The European Commission has officially ended its investigation into SAP’s aftermarket maintenance practices, after SAP agreed to abolish reinstatement fees and reduce back-maintenance fees. That is a concrete, customer-facing reversal: if you stopped paying SAP maintenance for a period and then wanted to come back, the price of rejoining SAP support would no longer be used as a deterrent. The Commission confirmed this in connection with its probe that started in September last year.

This matters right now because many enterprises are stuck in a transition timing squeeze. SAP’s mainstream support for SAP ERP Central Component (ECC) ends in December 2027, while customers can pay an additional two percentage points on their maintenance fees to access extended maintenance until December 2030. In other words, organizations need a plan for staying operational and supported, whether that means upgrading to SAP S/4HANA or extending ECC usage with some combination of vendor and third-party support. The Commission’s move is aimed at making that choice less expensive and less constrained, which directly affects procurement, vendor management, and IT operating budgets.

Zoom out and the incentive problem becomes easier to see. SAP is not only selling ERP software, it is also selling ongoing support, maintenance, and the ability to stay current enough to keep running mission-critical systems. Regulators have increasingly focused on the “aftermarket” dynamics, where a vendor may have leverage once a customer is already dependent. In September last year, the European Commission launched a formal investigation, saying it was responding to concerns that SAP restricted competition in the European aftermarket for maintenance and support services. The alleged mechanism was making it harder for rivals to compete, leading to fewer choices and higher costs for European customers.

SAP responded in October with a published set of commitments and arguments, including a core claim that its commitments were meant to improve the financial attractiveness for customers who wish to reinstate SAP maintenance and support. The document said that “future costs associated with reinstatement will not financially prevent customers from choosing to terminate SAP maintenance and support for a given period of time.” The Commission’s conclusion indicates that SAP’s follow-up agreement now satisfies the legal commitments needed to close the case.

So what exactly did SAP agree to do? The Commission confirmed that SAP will abolish reinstatement fees and reduce back-maintenance fees charged to customers who return to SAP’s support after a period of absence. SAP also agreed to clarify conditions that allow customers to choose different maintenance and support service providers and different levels of support from SAP. That second part is quietly important. The practical battlefield in these situations is rarely just price. It is also contractual clarity: what options a customer has, what conditions apply, and whether changing providers triggers restrictions that raise switching costs.

The competitive context helps explain why this regulatory outcome is bigger than it sounds. Gartner data cited in the reporting shows that in Q4 2024, only 39 percent of worldwide ECC customers, out of a total of 35,000, had bought or subscribed to licenses to start their transition to SAP S/4HANA. That means the majority are not yet at the “upgrade” step. With SAP’s ECC mainstream support ending in December 2027, and extended maintenance only extending the runway to December 2030, there is a multi-year window where enterprises are likely evaluating alternatives for reliability, security, and cost control.

There are already real-world examples of that evaluation. The report notes that in September last year, European retailer Kingfisher, which owns B&Q and Screwfix, told a Gartner conference it had chosen Rimini Street to support ECC 6.0. The reason it gave, as reported, was that it saw insufficient value in migrating to SAP S/4HANA at that time. While this is just one company’s story, it illustrates the kind of decision regulators are trying to make easier to exercise at scale: customers choosing third-party support options while navigating SAP’s policies around reinstatement and back maintenance.

The Commission framed the significance in terms that reach beyond this one case. EC executive vice president Teresa Ribera said in a statement: “SAP’s software is critical to businesses across Europe, and indeed globally. Today’s decision gives customers using SAP’s popular on-premises business management software more freedom to choose maintenance and support services without unfair restrictions that raised their costs and stifled competition. The legally binding commitments secured by the Commission set a benchmark for the industry more broadly and should serve as a warning against practices with similar effects in the cloud markets, where customers are increasingly moving.” SAP’s position was that its maintenance practices aligned with industry standards and that customers had a broad range of deployment, licensing, and support options across on-premise and cloud products.

SAP also specified the scope: the commitments relate solely to on-premise maintenance policies and do not concern SAP’s cloud offerings. It added that the added clarity and flexibility support customers as they modernize toward an “AI-enabled autonomous enterprise” at their own pace. Finally, the commitments will remain in force globally for ten years. For executives and boards, that global duration is not a footnote. It turns today’s policy change into a long-term constraint on SAP’s ability to reintroduce similar fee structures, and it sets a reference point other enterprise software vendors may have to plan around.

Strategically, this is a wake-up call for any enterprise software company that thinks aftermarket freedom is optional. And for buyers, it is a reminder that transition planning is not just an IT roadmap exercise, it is a regulatory and contract architecture exercise. When you are deciding whether to upgrade, extend, or mix vendor and third-party support, fee structure and contractual conditions can determine whether switching is viable or prohibitively expensive.