It has emerged recently that SAP has extended its end-of-support date for legacy goods, moving from 2025 to 2027 – including a three-year transitional duration and a 2030 final cut-off stage. Up to then, customers who are not on S/4 Hana will be moved to a “customer-specific maintenance model”-translated: your service will become even more expensive.
In the run-up to their deadline(s), SAP have waged a long marketing war in order to move their customers to S/4 Hana; not just the use of deadlines as an ultimatum, but also releasing positive survey results and customer numbers, to encourage any who are undecided.
However, Support Revolution is sceptical of SAP’s methods, because their results and statistics aren’t consistent with what we’re seeing in the wider ERP market.
The study states, “The 300 participants […] spanned 10 countries covering three regions, from organizations with 1,000-25,000 employees across a multitude of industries and were either planning to deploy (73%), have in production (9%) or currently deploying (18%) SAP S/4HANA.”
The survey results suggested that, of 300 participants, 100 percent of them were either deploying S/4 Hana in the near future, or were already doing it. It is also worth noting at this point that this survey was funded by, and samples were provided by, SAP.
As you might expect, the figures SAP have given here seem a little far-fetched, compared to what other surveys and reports have found and the general opinion of S/4 Hana at the moment.
Why are customers worried about S/4 Hana?
We’ve established that SAP’s marketing strategies are inconsistent; namely, their customer surveys don’t actually line up with their customers’ feedback.
But why are SAP’s customers hesitant in moving onto the newest product? What’s holding them back – and what should you, and your organisation, bear in mind before making your minds up?
SAP’s customers don’t want to play
Customers have understandably been cautious about moving onto S/4 Hana. Any organisations moving to the cloud-based, SaaS S/4 Hana would not see a typical ‘lift-and-shift’ upgrade – rather a full system reimplementation. Almost like installing a brand-new ERP system.
Therefore, any customisations that customers have developed on their systems become very difficult to shift onto the new cloud platform. The options of customers who want to stay with SAP generally come down to these three choices:
- Deny the S/4 Hana upgrade, and, in 2030, be put onto the maintenance model;
- Accept the upgrade, and make every effort to rework the new S/4 Hana software to suit their needs (an expensive and in some cases impossible option);
- Accept the upgrade, and change working processes to suit the new S/4 Hana functionality.
The support revolution of SAP
This leaves a lot of customers not going anywhere, not receiving any innovation or added benefit from their existing ERP suite, and yet, they are still expected to pay SAP’s substantial support fees.
High prices, for a service of very limited return. In any other situation – gym membership, insurance, streaming services – you’d consider cancelling your contract and looking elsewhere. Which hasn’t really been an option for Oracle and SAP customers – until fairly recently.