SAP Third-Party Support Compared: Rimini Street vs Spinnaker vs SAP

The Third-Party Support Market for SAP

The third-party SAP support market has grown substantially since the mid-2000s, driven primarily by organisations looking to avoid SAP's 22% annual maintenance fee while maintaining stable, customised SAP estates. Two providers dominate the market: Rimini Street, which is the market leader by scale and is publicly listed, and Spinnaker Support, which positions itself as a premium boutique alternative with higher per-customer attention. Other providers exist but have materially smaller market positions in SAP specifically.

The fundamental value proposition of third-party support is simple: pay approximately half of what you pay SAP, receive comparable or superior incident response for stable environments, and invest the savings in transformation or other technology priorities. The trade-offs — no SAP-issued patches and updates, potential IP risk, loss of access to new SAP features, and restricted cloud migration pathways — determine whether third-party support is the right choice for a specific organisation at a specific point in its SAP lifecycle.

SAP Native Support: What You Get for 22%

SAP Enterprise Support, at approximately 22% of net licence value, provides a defined set of entitlements that have evolved over the past decade. The core entitlements include access to SAP Notes and patches (including legal, regulatory, and tax updates), access to SAP's knowledge base and documentation portal, telephonic and portal-based incident support, access to SAP's Mission Control Centre for proactive system monitoring, run Simple business quality checks, and software lifecycle management tooling.

What SAP Enterprise Support does not include: implementation consulting, custom code modification or development, performance tuning beyond documented recommendations, dedicated named support engineers (unless you additionally purchase MaxAttention or Preferred Success), or guidance on third-party integrations beyond published SAP documentation. Many organisations are effectively paying 22% for incident resolution and regulatory updates — and receiving far less value from the premium entitlements than the total fee implies.

SAP's position on innovation access is important: only customers on active SAP support can access new S/4HANA features, cloud product updates, and SAP's AI and analytics capabilities embedded in the platform. Third-party support customers are frozen on their current software release at the time of switch, with no access to SAP's ongoing product development. For organisations with active innovation agendas tied to SAP's cloud roadmap, this is a material consideration. For organisations running stable, heavily customised ECC estates with no near-term innovation roadmap, it is not.

Rimini Street: Market Leader in Third-Party SAP Support

Rimini Street is the largest independent provider of enterprise software support, supporting thousands of SAP clients globally across ECC, S/4HANA, and other SAP product lines. It is publicly listed (NASDAQ: RMNI) and has invested significantly in expanding its support capabilities to include security patching and compliance updates that do not rely on SAP-issued materials.

Cost Structure

Rimini Street typically prices SAP support at approximately 50% of your current SAP annual support fee, with the fee fixed for the initial contract term (typically one to two years) and predictable annual increases capped in the contract. For an organisation paying $5 million annually in SAP Enterprise Support, this represents a potential saving of $2.5 million per year. The specific rate is negotiable — Rimini will adjust pricing based on your SAP estate size, contract length, and competitive situation.

Service Capabilities

Rimini Street's core SAP service includes 24/7 global incident support, tax and regulatory updates for 50+ countries (independently developed, not redistributed from SAP), custom code support (modifications, enhancements, and integrations unique to your environment), interoperability support for third-party systems integrated with SAP, and what Rimini terms "super SLAs" — response time commitments that exceed SAP's standard support SLAs, including 15-minute response times for critical Priority 1 incidents.

Rimini Street also offers security patching as part of its support service, which addresses a common concern about third-party support: the risk of falling behind on security updates. Rimini develops and delivers security patches for SAP products independently of SAP's patch releases, though the scope and coverage of these patches is not identical to SAP's official security updates.

Compliance and IP Risk

Rimini Street has been involved in significant intellectual property litigation with Oracle (in a related business line) and has faced legal scrutiny over its support delivery methodologies. As of 2025–2026, Rimini Street maintains that its SAP support services are delivered in compliance with applicable IP laws, and the company has updated its methodologies following court rulings. Buyers should obtain an up-to-date legal assessment of Rimini's current SAP support practices, including specifically whether the regulatory and security update delivery methodology creates any SAP licence agreement compliance issues in their jurisdiction.

Spinnaker Support: Premium Boutique Alternative

Spinnaker Support, founded in 2008, positions itself as a high-touch, boutique alternative to Rimini Street, emphasising service quality, customer proximity, and flexible contract terms over market scale. It supports hundreds of SAP clients and consistently receives high customer satisfaction scores on independent review platforms.

Cost Structure

Spinnaker Support's pricing is typically comparable to Rimini Street — approximately 50% of SAP's annual maintenance fee — though Spinnaker often offers additional flexibility on contract terms, including one-year contracts with renewal options, rather than requiring multi-year commitments. This flexibility is a genuine differentiator for organisations that are evaluating third-party support as a bridge solution while planning an S/4HANA migration, rather than as a long-term permanent arrangement.

Service Capabilities

Spinnaker's service proposition closely mirrors Rimini Street's core capabilities: 24/7 incident support, regulatory and tax updates, custom code support, and interoperability assistance. Where Spinnaker differentiates is in its service delivery model. Spinnaker assigns dedicated support engineers to client accounts, creating a named-resource relationship that many customers find more responsive and personalised than Rimini's pooled support model. Spinnaker guarantees 15-minute response times for Priority 1 incidents and claims satisfaction rates consistently above 98% in annual client surveys.

Spinnaker has invested in expanding its security patching capability, though — as with Rimini — the scope of independent security patching does not fully replicate SAP's native security update programme. Buyers in regulated industries (financial services, healthcare, government) should evaluate the specific security patching scope against their compliance requirements before switching.

Compliance and IP Risk

Spinnaker presents a lower public legal profile than Rimini Street, partly because it is smaller and privately held, and partly because it has emphasised compliance in its service methodology from inception. However, the fundamental IP question — whether a third-party provider can deliver regulatory and security updates for SAP software without infringing SAP's copyrights — applies to Spinnaker as it does to Rimini. Legal counsel review is recommended before switching to any third-party support provider.

Head-to-Head Comparison

When Third-Party Support Makes Sense

Third-party SAP support is most appropriate for organisations that meet specific criteria. The ideal candidate has a stable SAP estate — meaning the implementation is complete, customisations are mature, and there is no active transformation programme that requires SAP's co-innovation capabilities. The organisation is not planning a RISE with SAP or S/4HANA cloud migration in the next 12–24 months, or if migration is planned, it is sufficiently far out that the support savings during the bridge period outweigh the transition complexity. The organisation's regulatory compliance requirements can be met by third-party tax and regulatory updates without relying on SAP-issued security patches for its risk posture. And the annual support cost is significant enough that the 50% saving is material relative to the cost and effort of the switch.

Organisations for whom third-party support is typically not appropriate include those actively migrating to S/4HANA or RISE, those in regulated sectors where SAP security patches are a compliance requirement, those with active SAP innovation programmes tied to S/4HANA's embedded AI and analytics capabilities, and those where SAP has contractual provisions that restrict third-party support in ways that create legal exposure.

Using Third-Party Support as Negotiating Leverage (Without Switching)

One of the most valuable applications of third-party support knowledge is as a negotiating lever against SAP — even if you ultimately remain on native support. Obtaining a formal proposal from Rimini Street and Spinnaker, modelling the cost savings, and presenting the alternative to your SAP account team in the context of a support renewal negotiation typically produces one of three responses from SAP.

The first and most common response is an improved commercial offer: a multi-year fee freeze, a one-time credit, or a reduced support rate for a defined period. The second response is enhanced service entitlements — access to premium support features without the premium price — as SAP attempts to justify the cost differential through service quality rather than price competition. The third response is an accelerated RISE with SAP migration proposal, as SAP uses the third-party threat to drive a conversation about the broader commercial relationship.

Each of these responses benefits the buyer. The cost of obtaining third-party support proposals is zero. The negotiating value of those proposals, deployed correctly, consistently produces SAP commercial outcomes that are materially better than renewals conducted without the credible alternative in hand. For a comprehensive view of SAP support negotiation strategy, see our SAP Support Maintenance Negotiation article.