How Accurate Was SAP on S/4HANA Not Being Free for ECC Customers?

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Executive Summary

For years SAP has stated that SAP’s integrated suite offers a lower TCO.
In this article, we review the accuracy of this claim.

What SAP Said About S/4HANA Not Being Free for ECC Customers?

SAP frequently stated that S/4HANA was so much better and so much more innovative than ECC that, in SAP’s words, S/4HANA was the logical successor, but not the legal successor to ECC. This meant that S/4HANA would not be covered by the standard support contract terms that allowed a customer to upgrade to the most recent application version.

Our References for This Article

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Notice of Lack of Financial Bias: We have no financial ties to SAP or any other entity mentioned in this article.

This is published by a research entity, not some lowbrow entity that is part of the SAP ecosystem.
Second, no one paid for this article to be written, and it is not pretending to inform you while being rigged to sell you software or consulting services. Unlike nearly every other article you will find from Google on this topic, it has had no input from any company's marketing or sales department. As you are reading this article, consider how rare this is. The vast majority of information on the Internet on SAP is provided by SAP, which is filled with false claims and sleazy consulting companies and SAP consultants who will tell any lie for personal benefit. Furthermore, SAP pays off all IT analysts -- who have the same concern for accuracy as SAP. Not one of these entities will disclose their pro-SAP financial bias to their readers.

The Truth About S/4HANA’s Changes and Innovation?

S/4HANA has a new database schema, and its code has been rewritten, but it is simply not possible to view S/4HANA as a “new” application. ECC is with some housekeeping changes that are more internally focused than things that the customer will notice. Secondly, it does not use Fiori (the new UI) nearly as much as it uses the same old SAPGUI. Analysis of the code between ECC and S/4HANA shows a 90%+ overlap between the two systems. How can such an overlap translate into S/4HANA being considered an entirely new product for upgrade reasons?

It is illogical.

Conclusion and Calculation

SAP receives a 0% accuracy rating for defining S/4HANA as so new and different from ECC that it is not covered as a standard upgrade to ECC customers current on their support.

Link to the Parent Article

This is one of many research articles on a specific topic that supports a broader research calculation. For the overview of the research calculation for all of the SAP topics that were part of the study, see the following primary research A Study into SAP’s Accuracy.