On July 9, 2026, the European Commission closed a ten-month antitrust investigation into SAP’s on-premise maintenance and support practices, and the resolution directly reshapes the competitive landscape for every consulting firm and third-party support provider operating alongside SAP’s own maintenance business. The Commission opened its investigation in September 2025, concerned that SAP was restricting competition from third-party maintenance and support providers, and closed it after SAP agreed to a binding, decade-long package of global commitments rather than facing a formal finding of wrongdoing or a fine.
The Specific Barriers That Have Now Been Removed
Two changes in particular directly affect the commercial position of firms competing with SAP for support and maintenance work. Customers can now divide their SAP landscape into sub-areas and choose different support and maintenance providers, or different support levels, for each area separately, addressing the all-or-nothing bundling that had historically deterred customers from exploring third-party alternatives even when they only wanted to reduce coverage on part of their environment, and SAP has separately dropped its reinstatement fees and capped back-maintenance charges for customers seeking to return to SAP support after a period with a different provider.
Third-party support providers have understandably welcomed the change directly. Rimini Street’s own guidance for CIOs evaluating RISE with SAP has long pointed to exactly this kind of bundling friction as a genuine constraint on customer choice, noting that SAP intermediates the hyperscaler relationship as part of a bundled agreement in ways that can complicate changes to service levels, scope, or pricing as business requirements shift over time.
Why the Absence of a Fine Does Not Diminish the Impact
It would be easy to read this outcome as a minor regulatory footnote given that no financial penalty was issued. This was resolved through binding commitments rather than a finding of wrongdoing or a financial penalty, but customers should not mistake the absence of a fine for absence of impact, since the commitments are legally binding for ten years and apply globally, creating meaningful changes in how every SAP on-premise customer can manage maintenance, support, and licence entitlements going forward.
A decade-long, globally enforceable commitment arguably reshapes the competitive landscape more durably than a one-time fine ever could, since a fine addresses past conduct while this settlement permanently changes the rules under which every future maintenance and support decision gets made across SAP’s entire on-premise customer base.
What This Means for Consulting Firms Building a Third-Party Support Practice
Any consulting or managed services firm that has held back from building or expanding a third-party SAP support practice, wary of competing against SAP’s bundling advantage, now has a materially more open market to enter. The ability to win a customer’s business for a single sub-area of their landscape, rather than needing to displace SAP’s support relationship entirely, lowers the risk threshold for both the provider pitching the work and the customer considering it.
That lowered barrier is particularly relevant given the broader talent and delivery capacity constraints already affecting the wider SAP consulting market, since a substantial and durable base of on-premise support demand is likely to persist for years as larger, more complex organisations work through their own migration timelines at a necessarily slower pace than smaller, simpler estates.
How This Changes the Conversation With an Existing SI
Organisations already working with a large systems integrator on their broader S/4HANA or RISE transformation should raise this settlement directly with that same partner, since many large SIs also offer their own managed services and support practices that compete, at least in part, with SAP’s own maintenance business. An SI that has historically recommended keeping all support consolidated with SAP for simplicity now has a genuine, settlement-backed reason to revisit that recommendation for any client asking the question directly.
What On-Premise Customers Should Do With This New Flexibility
For any organisation still running SAP ECC or on-premise S/4HANA, the practical response is a direct review of the current maintenance structure against what is now newly available. Identifying which parts of the landscape genuinely warrant premium SAP support, and which lower-risk components could reasonably move to a third-party provider or a consulting firm’s own managed services offering, is now a decision that can be made area by area rather than as an all-or-nothing choice.
This review is also worth running in parallel with any active RISE or GROW migration planning, since the settlement’s new flexibility changes the calculus for how much of the existing on-premise estate needs to move on the original timeline versus how much can be maintained cost-effectively under a mixed support model while the migration proceeds at a more deliberate pace.
Conclusion
SAP’s July 2026 settlement with the European Commission opens genuine new commercial territory for third-party support providers and consulting firms competing against SAP’s own maintenance business, removing bundling restrictions and reinstatement penalties that had long protected SAP’s position in this specific market.
Organisations managing on-premise SAP environments, and the consulting and support firms competing to serve them, should treat this settlement as an active, near-term opportunity to renegotiate how maintenance responsibility is split across a landscape, rather than a distant regulatory development to revisit only when a support contract naturally comes up for renewal.
