Prepare to pay
“I view this as a net win for SAP,” he continued. “SAP customers that want to use Celonis over the native SAP Signavio solution should be prepared to pay for the privilege. The broader issue of antitrust will likely prove much harder to build a case against SAP based on the plethora of competitive options in the marketplace. It is hard to prove antitrust violations based on price alone for one segment of a large and multi-faceted solution.”
On broader data management issues, Bickley said that SAP was implying that “SAP customers or third-party vendors accessing SAP data layers via the ODP via RFC protocol may be in a state of non-compliance with SAP’s copyright rules. SAP has also invoked obscure licensing rules around the HANA database, informing customers that they must upgrade from the runtime version of HANA to the enterprise version based on how Celonis accesses the database,” Bickley said. “This could result in fees ranging from hundreds of thousands of dollars to millions of dollars for SAP customers, depending on the size of their DB. Lastly, SAP is pulling a page from the cloud hyperscaler playbook by now charging for data egress via their Datasphere solution. Yes, it is exorbitantly costly, but not unlike data egress from the hyperscalers’ clouds themselves. So it is technically feasible for Celonis to access the SAP data layer as they have previously; however, the underlying cost will be exponentially higher for SAP customers.”
Robert Kramer, a VP and principal analyst for Moor Insights & Strategy, said that this SAP case — not unlike many American antitrust cases — needs to convince a judge or jury that the accused vendor has crossed that nebulous line between aggressive competition and illegal behavior.
