We will review all planned investments in IT equipment, hardware, software, facilities, and company cars, as well as internal IT projects ... Do not order any new equipment at this time.

No one at this point can say how markets and customers will react in the coming months ... In this turbulent economic environment, we will be giving added attention to sustaining our margin and earnings health.

There is a complete headcount and hiring freeze, and all existing job vacancies will be canceled. This includes any temporary workers, interns, and students. There will be no replacements for employees leaving SAP. No internal transfers may take place. Only those written offers sent to a candidate and/or internal transfers agreed to on or before October 7, 2008, will go forward.

Since we are not hiring, all engagement with external recruiters must cease immediately. We will discontinue engagement with management consultants and evaluate the impact this has on ongoing projects. Until further notice, all external training is to be canceled. Internal meetings must be held within SAP buildings, and you cannot rent external conference facilities for this purpose.

Cease ALL internal non-customer-facing travel in October…Any non-customer-facing travel already booked should be canceled immediately, even if this incurs penalties.

Also in the memo: SAP salespeople will have to fly coach from now on, unless they use miles to upgrade. The WSJ doesn't specify if "from now on" means until next quarter, or forever. Either way I'm stoked, because airlines will soon have to redefine "coach" to give me enough room to open a 17-inch laptop.

Over 200 big corporate customers like the American Red Cross and Southern California Edison are now without an alternative to Oracle's legendarily steep support fees. At the same time, SAP announced a new fee structure that fixes support costs at 22 percent of the original purchase price, compared to TomorrowNow who simply charged half of whatever Oracle did. Oracle in turn announced a 15-20 percent increase in support fees for U.S. customers. Hey, everybody wins!

If you're not familiar with IT at the big-corporation scale, enterprise software support fees are huge extra payments tacked on to any major software purchase for a large company — paying 22 percent of the original license, annually, isn't unusual. These fees in theory cover the cost of application support, patches and upgrades. Here's what's happening with Oracle: Big corporations trying to deal with a stalled economy are held in a stranglehold by application providers like Oracle, who can charge a lot for ongoing support because it's still cheaper than changing applications for 3,500+ users.

A newer option for enterprise customers is SaaS — software as a service. Instead of being installed on the customer's computes, the app is maintained on a Web server owned by the vendor. SaaS supposedly lowers the customer's infrastructure cost — no servers to own or maintain — and makes it easier for them to switch brands if they're not happy. But switching apps isn't free or easy if you're the electric company. Who's going to pay for TomorrowNow's shutdown? Probably you.