Expanding Section: The Implications of the Issues with S/4HANA Go Lives

We predicted that SAP would certify other databases for S/4HANA in the article Why SAP Will Have to Backtrack on S/4HANA on HANA. To our surprise, this has yet to happen. There is little doubt that the requirement to use HANA has held back S/4HANA implementations.

It is 2019, and more than five years from the planned drop of support for ECC by SAP. We previously predicted SAP would move that deadline past 2025. We view this deadline as entirely artificial and designed to scare customers into moving to S/4HANA and has nothing to do with SAP’s ability to provide that support. S/4HANA is now more than 4 years old and has so few live customers, and with ECC being updated it appears that ECC and S/4HANA will now coexist in the market for some time — much as the Oracle database does, with most Oracle customers using older versions of the database and not seeing the value to upgrading. This will create a fertile market for 3rd party support providers particularly as once a 3rd party support provider can cover ECC and BW, they can cover the needs of a large segment of SAP customers as SAP products outside of ECC and BW, even if implemented, have an exceedingly high failure rate.

This can’t have been SAP’s plan and means that either SAP will extend the deadline (which they will do) or the third party support business for SAP will explode.