SAP customers may struggle to escape ECC before support shutters if they don't start now Global ERP giant SAP has set a deadline of 2027 to get off its ECC ERP system before mainstream support ends. But representatives of German-speaking users fear a significant number will fail to meet the 2030 cut-off when extended support ends. Speaking to The Register, DSAG chairman Jens Hungershausen said there was concern …
Why should an enterprise customer accept that a vulgar vendor decide what it is supposed to do and in what timeframe ?
I don't give a flying fuck that SAP thinks it's the bees knees, it is dealing with companies who are actually working and providing services to the public.
Since when do the back-end administrative processes decide what a company is supposed to do ?
This is nuts.
The evidence is that migration on a well supported and structured path between two products from one vendor is completely different to reimplementation on another product from another vendor.
A few major vendors have invested in tools to migrate from their main competitors in an effort to close the gap. However still not a trivial exercise.
Never underestimate the importance and difficulty of integration in enterprise solutions, typically 40% of effort when done well, otherwise more.
In summary 'easily migrate', not likely.
Such enterprises have decided that their business is not enterprise software applications life cycle management so that a specialist will be more effective to do it. That out sourcing has consequences so that cost of ownership is a business concern.
What SAP says is that your business has cost benefit levers and can choose where to put them. For decades customers were allowed to fall behind the fully supported software however the pace of change demanded by customers and the costs they accept no longer allow a tail of hundreds of supported language, jurisdiction and product permutations.
This is an application life cycle management challenge that any significant vendor must manage on behalf of all customers but its inevitable that some can't be educated and enabled to take timely action. That's just human behaviour...
The SAP Movement opportunity has been available for a long time, with ever improving tools to enable customer success.
The move from on premise to cloud infrastructure has been the low hanging fruit to move from capital expenditure on premises to operational expenditure in the cloud. However this just provides financial benefit as ECC remains. The infra move to cloud can deliver an opportunity to start with HANA, so ditch database licence costs and do some limited code improvement. But the bigger benefits are in S/4.
To get a transformation to S/4HANA requires migration of your distinctive enhancements or a fit to standard approach to deal with long term cost of ownership challenges.
The UX improvement opportunity can be started on ECC Fiori but that transformation is not complete so still requires Enterprise Portal to bring it all together.
S/4 provides Fiori UX (UI5) as the foundation and the ability to keep the core clean while side by side extension on Business Technology Platform (BTP) integrates with a single design language.
S/4HANA private cloud edition (PCE) provides both infra and application cloud platform benefits with the ability to integrate SAP and 3rd party services in a scalable hybrid architecture. Key for reluctant DSAG users is the ability to use familiar ABAP extensions (RAP) or modernise to supported languages or bring your own language (CAP).. Test automation and CI/CD help to keep cost of ownership under control within the Cloud ALM framework.
Extended support may buy a little time to smooth the human resource limitations but well supported applications are a real business requirement and the innovation by SAP the competitive advantage icing on the cake. If you snooze, you loose..
Large enterprise 'non-software' companies try that all the time, and it's practically always disastrous over the long-term. Trying to get anywhere near the feature set and stability of decent software is incredibly expensive, and you have to run the team(s) for a very long time, the TCO is massively more expensive before you account for all the operational issues you will have. And in reality, you're not going to do this for everything, so the business will still have masses of commercial software to operate.
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