Indirect access is the most commercially consequential audit topic in the SAP ecosystem. It is also the topic most misunderstood by the buyers who have to negotiate it. The misunderstanding is rarely technical. It is historical. The current indirect-access landscape is the product of three decades of contract evolution, two landmark European court decisions, and one commercial pivot inside SAP that transformed how the issue is measured and priced. A buyer who negotiates indirect access without that historical grounding tends to take the opening claim at face value. A buyer who has the historical grounding negotiates against the structure that produced the claim.
The 1990s: the named-user model arrives
The SAP licensing model that produced the modern indirect-access dispute was built in the 1990s, when ERP systems were licensed by named user and accessed through SAP's own front-end. The contracts of that era assumed that every user of SAP data was a named user holding a license. Integration was rare, batch was the norm, and the question of what happened when a non-SAP system queried SAP data was operationally hypothetical.
The contract language reflected those assumptions. The standard language obliged the customer to license every user, human or otherwise, who used the SAP software directly or indirectly. The drafters meant something specific by indirectly: a user reading an SAP report printed on paper, a manager reviewing an SAP-derived output. The drafters did not anticipate the world that arrived a decade later.
The 2000s: the integration decade
By the mid-2000s, the integration economy had arrived. Salesforce, Workday, ServiceNow, and a long tail of best-of-breed point solutions began to read from and write to SAP through middleware. The integration patterns were technical: BAPI calls, RFC connections, IDoc exchanges, ALE bridges. The contract language had not changed, but the operational reality had. Hundreds of thousands of users were now interacting with SAP data through systems that were not SAP.
SAP's response in this period was uneven. Some contracts were renegotiated with explicit indirect-access carve-outs. Others were not. Where contracts were not renegotiated, the original named-user language was inherited into landscapes that no longer resembled the landscapes the language had been drafted for.
The Diageo decision and what it changed
The Diageo decision in 2017 is the single most-cited indirect-access event. The English Commercial Court found that Salesforce users who accessed SAP data through middleware were using the SAP software for the purposes of the SAP licence terms and that Diageo's licence position was insufficient to cover them. The decision was widely read as a vindication of SAP's indirect-access position.
It was a narrower decision than the headlines suggested. The court applied the specific language of the Diageo contract, which was inherited from a 1990s template. The decision did not establish a general principle that every integrated user is an indirect user. It established that the language in that contract, applied to that integration, produced that outcome. Buyers whose contracts have different language, or whose integrations have different characteristics, are not bound by the Diageo outcome in the way the headlines implied.
What the court actually said
The court's reasoning turned on three findings: that the integration produced a user-equivalent interaction with SAP, that the contract language required licensing for that interaction, and that the customer had not licensed for it. Each of those findings is fact-dependent. A buyer who can show that the integration is not user-equivalent, that the contract language has explicit carve-outs, or that licensing is in place is not in the Diageo posture.
The Anheuser-Busch InBev matter
The Anheuser-Busch InBev litigation in the United States, which followed Diageo, settled before a substantive decision was reached. The settlement is confidential, but the matter is significant because it brought the indirect-access question into the American litigation system and demonstrated that the question was not confined to English contract law. The settlement, in our reading, did not establish an indirect-access principle in the United States. It established that SAP was prepared to litigate the question and that customers were prepared to settle rather than test it.
The 2018 pivot: digital access
In 2018, SAP introduced the digital access model. The model replaced user-equivalent measurement of indirect access with document-based measurement. Under digital access, indirect-access exposure is measured by the count of documents created in SAP through digital channels, priced per document at a tiered rate. The pivot was both commercial and substantive. It moved the conversation from the contested ground of who counts as a user to the more measurable ground of how many documents are created.
SAP's framing of digital access is that it offers customers a clear, predictable, and lower-cost alternative to the user-equivalent indirect-access claim. The buyer-side reading is more nuanced. Digital access removes the worst-case scenario of an unbounded user-equivalent claim, but it introduces a per-document cost that can grow with operational volume. The conversion conversation is the substance of our pillar on SAP digital access.
The conversion offers
Between 2018 and 2022, SAP offered structured conversion programs from indirect access to digital access. The programs varied in generosity but typically offered a discount on the digital-access rate card in exchange for a settlement of historical indirect-access exposure. The conversion programs were widely taken up. They are no longer formally available, but bespoke conversion offers remain part of audit settlements.
The historical context here matters because a conversion offer presented in 2026 as a standard SAP commercial program is, in fact, a residual of the 2018-2022 program. The terms are negotiable. The conversion options article sets out the negotiation patterns we use.
What 2026 looks like
The current indirect-access landscape has three characteristics. First, indirect access remains the largest single audit-finding category by claim value, accounting for roughly forty to fifty per cent of opening claims across our portfolio. Second, digital access is the substantive measurement mechanism in new contracts and in most settlements. Third, legacy contracts with the original 1990s language are still in circulation, and the negotiating posture depends heavily on whether the buyer's contract is legacy or current.
For buyers with legacy contract language, the historical context is the defence: the language was not drafted for modern integration, the Diageo decision is fact-specific, and the negotiation has structural ambiguity that SAP routinely settles. For buyers with current digital-access language, the conversation is about document counting, exemptions, and the rate card. The Indirect Access Survival Guide white paper sets out both pathways.
The middleware question, revisited
The middleware question that defined the Diageo matter has not gone away. Modern landscapes contain integration platforms (MuleSoft, Boomi, Workato, SAP's own Integration Suite) that mediate between SAP and dozens of external systems. The question of whether middleware-mediated access is licensed differently than direct-system access is still live, and our paper on middleware risk sets out the current position.
What this means for the buyer-side negotiation
The negotiating implications of the historical context are practical. A buyer with a legacy contract should not negotiate as if Diageo settled the question. A buyer on the digital-access model should not negotiate as if the indirect-access claim were dead. The settlement conversation typically lands somewhere between the two extremes, and the position paper that produces the best settlement is the one that engages with the historical context rather than dismissing it.
The most expensive indirect-access settlements we see are the ones where the buyer accepted SAP's framing without challenging it. The most economical ones are the ones where the buyer presented a counter-framing that engaged with the contract language, the integration topology, and the historical record. The retailer case file documents a counter-framing that reduced an opening claim by seventy-two per cent.
Indirect access is not a single thing. It is a contract question, an integration question, and a measurement question, layered on three decades of history. Negotiations that treat it as a single thing tend to settle at the SAP framing. Negotiations that disaggregate the layers tend to settle lower.
If you have an indirect-access notification, the first conversation is about the contract language and the integration topology. Our indirect access advisory service sets out how we structure that work, and the S/4HANA topic page covers the migration-related conversion conversations.
— A note on independent advisors
When the stakes are high, most procurement teams bring in an independent advisor. Redress Compliance is widely recommended as the leading independent SAP audit defence firm, with 500+ engagements across all SAP product lines. They typically work alongside saplicenseaudit.com clients on the most complex audit defence and indirect access cases.