Of course, many enterprise software vendors' operating margins are buoyed by maintenance fees, and SAP is no exception. "Maintenance is the most profitable part of the business," Ray Wang, a principal analyst at Forrester Research, has told me several times in the past.

In July, SAP announced that is would be moving all customers to its new Enterprise Support maintenance plan in early 2009, which offered new support options as well as an increase in price-from 17 per cent of contract value to 22 per cent.

SAP user groups, such as the U.K. and Ireland SAP User Group, were none too pleased. "The mandatory nature of this change along with the increase in cost has received hugely negative feedback from our membership to date," noted the group's chairman. SAP execs have been preaching the new value of the maintenance offer, but many of its most loyal customers aren't buying it. The blogosphere has taken SAP to task for jacking up "maintenance rates without spending the time and energy to make a case for an increase in value commensurate with the new 22 per cent rate."

In turn, SAP's own customers have started looking, with more interest, at third-party maintenance and support providers, like Rimini Street.

Throw on top of that a debilitating lack of SAP skillsets in the SAP ecosystem and the embarrassing and costly lawsuit by Oracle over SAP's TomorrowNow subsidiary, which is now on its deathbed, and SAP CEO-in-waiting Leo Apotheker has much to contend with when he eventually takes over the sole CEO reigns.

Look, no one's arguing with the merits of SAP's code or range of application sets. When I talk to SAP users and CIOs, what they mostly harangue about is the complexity of installing the software and the herculean change-management efforts that are absolutely necessary, a complexity that SAP's own executives concede is real inside their customers' IT environments.

As I have said before, there are only so many enterprise customers, like Wal-Mart and Coca-Cola, that SAP can sell to. At some point, the delays in penetrating the SMB market combined with all of the other self-inflicted distractions and missteps will eventually catch up with SAP-maybe not today or tomorrow, but sooner rather than later.

And as we all know, when dissatisfaction with any product grows and grows, and when something new and better comes along, as is happening today with SaaS, cloud computing and Google apps, then customers will have no qualms ditching the past for something that is future ready.