To successfully develop, implement and operate information technology (IT), organisations often focus on developing and outlining processes for managing complexity, mitigating risks and controlling costs.

To address these business challenges in 2010 and beyond, SAP now offers customers a comprehensive and tiered portfolio of support offerings. You can select your support level based on your individual business needs and considerations, including your landscape complexity and desired depth of SAP® support.

All of our offerings are built upon long-standing experience in supporting enterprise-critical applications. With more than 35 years of close engagement with customers, SAP has developed and is continuously improving tools, processes and methodologies to empower customers and deliver support at the highest level. With access to the SAP Service Marketplace extranet, SAP Notes service, and support packages, as well as the SAP Solution Manager application management solution, customers are able to maximise the value of SAP support offerings.

Our industry-leading offering, SAP Enterprise Support services, provides proactive support in addition to all the features of the SAP Standard Support option. These proactive support services encompass tools, processes and services that enable continuous improvement, holistic application lifecycle management for continuous innovation, business and operational process improvements and levers to address total cost of operation (TCO). Your application landscape may increasingly support global business processes that extend to your customers, vendors and business partners around the clock. Thus, SAP Enterprise Support addresses increased demand by providing support for mission-critical business processes, and as such, is the ideal offering for most businesses.

SAP Enterprise Support addresses underlying business demands by helping customers increase efficiencies, thereby reducing TCO and system downtime. Rapidly changing business environments require not only agile business process adoption, but also transparent processes and respective improvement measures. This transparency can highlight where risks to business processes reside, how to address them before business operations are disrupted and how to improve the efficiency of business processes. Altogether, SAP Enterprise Support brings widespread advantages to companies of all sizes. Based on customer feedback, SAP Enterprise Support has already proven significant value and will continue to do so going forward.

SAP Standard Support is a basic offering now available for reliable response to technical disruptions, and for maintaining system health and integrity. With this offering, you benefit from insights into SAP solutions and expertise to mitigate risk, while tapping the innovations that SAP continually introduces. In addition, you have access to tools for use within your own IT organisation.

Our supplemental support offerings are tailored to individual requirements. These offerings include:

• SAP MaxAttention™ support – Our tailored support offering with a full range of services customised for your individual needs, driven by an on-site technical quality manager
• SAP Safeguarding services – Our project-based offering to help you manage risks and enable the technical robustness of your SAP solutions during implementation, upgrade and operations

These offerings help you gain protection for your system performance and stability, flexibility in support options to meet changing needs of your business, and collaboration throughout the entire application lifecycle to successfully secure your operations.

Our support offerings are designed to help you respond to issues and continuously improve your core business processes – all while leveraging your existing solutions and providing the guidance you need to become a best-run business.