According to Gartner, forty percent of SAP customers will not be ready to migrate from legacy software by the 2030 deadline. Will SAP have to give in?
SAP normally ends support for its legacy ERP platform Business Suite 7 including ECC 6.0 in 2027, with the option to extend to 2030 for a fee. The deadline has been set for years, yet many companies have not yet begun the migration process. Gartner predicts in an analysis that that won’t be much better by 2030.
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Gartner calls SAP’s legacy deadline ‘unrealistic’
The analysis firm claims that today 60 percent of SAP customers are still using the legacy platform today and have no intention of moving to S/4HANA. By 2030, which is basically the deadline to complete the migration, that would still be 40 percent. SAP can’t just abandon those customers, Gartner believes, and so SAP should “reconsider the maintenance end date and cloud migration strategy.
“Annual support is a highly profitable part of SAP’s business, and the limited acceptance of its newer offering may force the company to reconsider its current approach. As a result, some customers choose to delay a decision and wait to see if SAP revisits its position and extends the deadline. Many SAP customers are unable to make a compelling business case for moving to S/4HANA,” Gartner said.
Limited concessions
Whether SAP will go along with that reasoning remains to be seen. The company is fighting a long-standing battle to get customers to move to the cloud. Exclusive AI features to financial compensation: SAP has already tried everything. Such attempts mainly provoke dissatisfaction among customers who are comfortable in the legacy environment. The fear of a long and complex migration project holds companies back.
SAP has already had to revise the deadline. According to the original schedule, the legacy platform was supposed to be shut down as early as this year, but so that has been pushed back to 2030. Under very specific conditions, companies can get a deferral beyond 2030, but this is not a gesture that SAP wants to offer for its broad clientele. CEO Christian Klein made it clear that the deferral does not serve to “extend the life of legacy software.