The majority of SAP's ECC users have not purchased licenses for S/4HANA – meaning its unlikely some of the world's largest businesses will migrate before mainstream support for the legancy platform ends in 2027.
Some 61 percent of clients yet to make the move, according to latest figures from global tech research company Gartner. This indicates a steady yet very small increase in SAP ERP users moving to the new platform, with little to suggest the gentle gradient on that graph will steepen in the future.
SAP provides the core business applications for some of the world's largest businesses, particularly in Europe, where giants such as VW Group, Siemens and Airbus are customers.
In its latest research tracking SAP migrations off its legacy ECC ERP platform, Gartner found that by the end of 4Q last year, approximately 39 percent of worldwide ECC customers — from a total of 35,000 – had bought or subscribed to licenses to start their transition to SAP S/4HANA, a platform first launched in 2015.
SAP plans to end mainstream support for ECC at the end of 2027. With that deadline fast approaching — and customers needing to allocate a couple of years at least for a large ERP migration — SAP is barely shifting the dial in terms of the long term trend.
In Q2 2024, 37 percent of ECC customers had licensed S/4HANA, compared with 34 percent a year earlier.
Christian Hestermann, Gartner senior director and analyst for business applications and co-author of the report, told The Register that he didn't see any reason for this to change in the future.
"Gartner hasn't seen announcements that would certainly change the trend. It's almost 10 years since the first official version of S/4HANA. First, the story was about the in-memory database system, which makes everything so much faster and makes building reports so much easier, etc. By 2020, the pandemic hit. So everybody said, 'Oh my god, you'll be so disrupted in your supply chain. You have to have a more modern system that can help you through the pandemic.' That didn't happen," he said.
Despite all these efforts, and the introduction of the RISE with SAP commercial arrangement to help customers move to the cloud and migrate to S/4HANA — offered in conjunction with partners and hyperscalers — SAP struggled to get anything but a steady migration trend among ECC customers.
Hestermann said: "Since September 2023, the message is about AI and the copilot called Joule. The message now is, 'You have to have AI, otherwise you'll not be able to survive.' That so far did not have a major influence. So none of those big events or big announcements has made a massive change up to now; the progress has remained fairly steady."
But there have been signs that SAP might provide some avenues through which the support deadline could be extended. While mainstream support for ECC shutters at the end of 2027, extended support, at a 2 percent premium, is available until the end of 2030.
In January, SAP announced a new offer called SAP ERP, Private Edition. This will be a cloud and transition service offering for SAP ECC customers, and is set to extend ECC support until 2033 – as long as customers sign up to the subscription model before 2028.
Gartner said it expects more details to be announced in the second half of 2025.
SAP might point to a bright note in the Gartner research: customers signing up to its RISE with SAP program have reached 58 percent of its total sales, an increase from 41 percent in the second quarter of 2024.
Hestermann said that conversations with SAP customers showed they were finding it more difficult to negotiate migration deals outside of RISE with SAP.
"A number of those are being told that SAP would not offer them a different construct anymore. So they experience a lot of pressure," he said.
However, SAP was also trying to provide incentives by extending a bundle of AI technologies which had previously only been available in the public cloud to the private cloud edition. ®