As reported by several media outlets and confirmed by SAP CEO Christian Klein during its Q4 2024 earnings call, SAP will offer an additional three years of support for some on-premises ERP (enterprise resource planning) customers beyond the existing extended maintenance support of 2030. This news came as a surprise for many ERP customers globally who have been struggling to plan and complete their ECC to S/4HANA migrations under the RISE with SAP offering before the end of 2027, which is the current mainstream maintenance end date. Many of these customers potentially would not have completed the move even by the end of 2030, the extended maintenance end date.
While there has been steady adoption of S/4HANA Cloud Private Edition under RISE with SAP, there were no strong indicators that this adoption was accelerating at a higher rate. Two core reasons contributing to this:
- There’s significant costs and time associated with the sheer amount of massive transformation and systems migration undertaking. Some customers, struggling with budget issues while running a business under the current tough macroeconomic conditions and geopolitical instability, had reservations about the extended time that it would take them to realize the ROI on the migration investment.
- The other aspect hampering a higher rate of adoption of S/4HANA is the complex technical and third-party applications landscape that is closely tied with the customers’ ERP systems — each with their own end-of-support deadlines, migration costs, licensing complexity, and technical interdependency with different version of the ERP systems’ underlying tech stack. This makes the case for easy and fast S/4HANA migration severely constrained for customers, even when they engage highly mature systems integrators to assist with multiyear migration programs.
SAP has recognized these challenges by what appears to be a selective extension of support — with conditions. Details of the new support announcement are as follows:
- In the first half of 2025, SAP will announce a cloud subscription transition option designed for ERP customers with large and very complex IT landscapes who need more time to transform on their RISE with SAP journey and move to S/4HANA.
- This option, the SAP ERP private-edition transition option, will consist of an SAP ERP cloud subscription, complemented with services designed to facilitate the transition to RISE with SAP and maintain customers’ business continuity.
- The option will be offered for the period from 2031 until the end of 2033.
- The SAP CEO confirmed that this is not a prolongation of the mainstream maintenance for beyond the 2020-communicated deadlines of the end of 2027 and is also not a prolongation of the extended maintenance end-of-2030 deadline.
- SAP is to release more information to the market in the first half of 2025, with additional details on the offering.
While some media outlets have reported that any customers who sign a RISE with SAP contract are the ones who receive the above offer, Forrester has been unable to confirm these statements, as the official details are still forthcoming. As for now, based on Klein’s answers to investor questions during the earnings call, it is certainly not a blanket offer to all customers who sign up and commit to a RISE with SAP contract but is rather very dependent on certain large-scale customers with highly complex application landscapes and third-party application technical stack footprint dependency that prevents them from effectively moving to S/4HANA faster. SAP appears to be offering the customers an easier pathway to transition these third-party applications to the SAP solutions/product stack. Forrester is looking forward to analyzing this aspect further with the official release of more information from SAP in the coming months.
For more insights on SAP, S/4HANA cloud transformations, on-premises ERP support, RISE, GROW, or this specific announcement, clients can book time with me (via an inquiry or guidance session).