March 20. This is the latest stage in the company's exit from the country, although large Russian companies continue to use its solutions.
SAP CIS, a Russian subsidiary of SAP (RBK has a copy), announced in a letter to customers that it will stop accessing its cloud services for customers in Russia from March 20, 2024. The company received the corresponding notification from its parent company due to the need to comply with mandatory restrictions. In the letter, the company asks users to download data from the SAP cloud before the specified date to avoid losing it. It also expressed its readiness to "immediately negotiate the early termination of the cloud services agreement."
How SAP left Russia
SAP is the world's largest costa rica whatsapp number database supplier of business applications: enterprise resource planning (ERP), customer relationship management (CRM), supply chain management (SCM), etc. Until March 2022, SAP solutions in Russia were used by government and financial organizations, companies from the trade, logistics, industry, etc. As a source close to SAP told RBC earlier, it had about 1,500 clients in Russia, including such large companies as Russian Railways, Aeroflot, Sberbank, VTB, Alfa-Bank, X5 Group, M.Video-Eldorado, Cherkizovo, almost all oil and gas, chemical, and metallurgical companies.
After the start of the special military operation, SAP stopped concluding new contracts for the sale of services and products in Russia, and also stopped supporting clients included in the US and EU sanctions lists. In September last year, it became known that SAP notified the remaining Russian clients that it would disconnect them from software support until December 31, 2023, only the use of cloud services remained in effect.
At the same time, some clients continued to use SAP systems installed on the company's resources. A number of Russian IT players began offering technical support services and troubleshooting of SAP systems for local clients. Among such "contractors" is, in particular, the company "Lab SP" created by the former head of SAP in Russia Andrey Filatov.
What awaits customers after the shutdown
Pavel Deverilin, CEO of Lab SP, told RBC that he is familiar with the text of the letter from SAP CIS. He calls it "the last stage of SAP's exit from the market." "The company first stopped selling software, then announced the closure of the data center, offering some clients to switch to the European data center in Amsterdam. Then the company turned off support for on-premise products. Now it has been announced that they will stop supporting clients who have transferred solutions to the European data center," he explained. According to Deverilin, about 30 companies that did not find a quick replacement for SAP cloud products took advantage of the offer to switch to the data center in Amsterdam.
According to him, clients who lost SAP support but continued to work on the company's systems "have fully adapted to the situation over the past year and are not experiencing any problems."
Since the year before last, companies have been actively switching from SAP solutions to domestic ones, agrees Alexander Fix, product manager for KROK's Cloud Services. For example, SAP's share in the ERP segment used to be almost 12%, but has now dropped to 3%. In his opinion, the situation is similar with SAP cloud services.
A number of Russian companies, after the departure of technical support from Western partners, remained on their IT solutions, receiving support through gray schemes via CIS countries, says Mikhail Bocharov, Deputy General Director for Science at SiSoft Development. "But SAP is still implemented in Russian companies of international level, where work on the pirate principle is prohibited," Bocharov pointed out. "Now those who are engaged in export or have joint projects abroad will have to quickly find a replacement for SAP."
At the same time, the co-founder of "New Cloud Technologies" (developer of the office software "MyOffice"), member of the board of the association "Domestic Software" Dmitry Komissarov believes that those users who have not yet switched from SAP solutions to Russian analogues will hardly have time to do so before March 20. "The deadlines are very tight. If you start today, it will be almost impossible to make it. This should have been done when SAP announced the end of support for its traditional products," Komissarov reasons.