SAP has set a deadline that is reshaping the plans of tens of thousands of large organizations. Mainstream support for SAP ECC, the ERP that has run finance, supply chain and operations for many of the world's biggest companies for the better part of two decades, is coming to an end. This is a short, plain-English guide to what that actually means, the real dates, why SAP is doing it, and what customers are doing about it, whether they are migrating to S/4HANA or staying on ECC for years yet. What SAP ECC isSAP ECC (ERP Central Component, part of SAP Business Suite 7) is the on-premise ERP that runs finance, supply chain, manufacturing, procurement and HR for a large share of the world's biggest companies. When someone says "we run SAP," they usually mean ECC. It is the system of record, heavily customized over many years, and deeply tied to how the business operates day to day. S/4HANA is SAP's next-generation replacement. It runs on SAP's in-memory HANA database, has a simpler data model and a modern interface, and it is where SAP is putting its investment. Customers can run it on-premise, in a private cloud, or in a public cloud edition. The move from ECC to S/4HANA is not a routine upgrade. In most cases it is a full re-implementation, and it typically runs as a 12 to 24 month program that touches data, custom code, integrations and business processes all at once. The deadline, and what it actually meansSAP has put a firm clock on ECC to encourage the move:
One point is widely misunderstood, so it is worth being clear about it. End of support does not mean ECC stops working on 1 January 2028. The software keeps running. What stops is SAP fixing problems, issuing patches, and shipping the legal and tax updates that finance and compliance teams depend on. For regulated businesses, that is the real exposure, not the system going dark. Why SAP is doing thisThe deadline is a commercial lever as much as a technical one. SAP wants to move its installed base onto S/4HANA, and increasingly into the cloud through its RISE with SAP program, for a few connected reasons:
The scale of the ECC base and the depth of customization make this one of the largest forced-modernization events the enterprise software market has seen. How many customers are actually delaying, and whyThe migration is genuinely underway. By late 2025, around 59% of surveyed SAP customers were fully or partially live on S/4HANA, up 13 points on the year before. The momentum is real, particularly among the largest enterprises. At the same time, close to half the installed base is not moving on SAP's timetable. At the end of 2024, only about 39% of ECC customers, roughly 14,000 out of 35,000, had migrated. Gartner projects that around 17,000 customers, close to half the base, will still be running ECC when the 2027 deadline arrives. IDC puts the figure at 40 to 45% of ECC users remaining on the older system through 2027. The reason is straightforward. For many organizations the business case does not yet stack up. In one 2025 survey, 95% said building a positive return-on-investment case for S/4HANA is difficult or takes significant effort, and nine in ten were worried about rising and unpredictable subscription costs. Nearly a quarter said they plan to stay on on-premise ECC. The barriers most often cited come down to the cost and disruption of the move itself: complex customizations built up over many years, and migration programs that can run from a few million dollars into the hundreds of millions. ECC still runs the company, so for a lot of boards the migration looks like cost and risk now in exchange for benefits that are hard to quantify, and it slips behind work that earns revenue. A growing group has gone further and chosen a "composable" approach on purpose: keep ECC as the core, add analytics and automation around it, and buy time without committing to a full re-implementation. The options if you are not readyIf a customer cannot or will not migrate by 2027, paying SAP more is not the only choice. There are three broad routes, and they are increasingly weighed together. Pay SAP for extended maintenance to 2030. The simplest option. It costs roughly two percentage points more on the maintenance bill and pushes the cliff edge out to the end of 2030. It is a premium for the same support, and the clock still runs out. Move to third-party support. Independent providers take over support of the existing ECC system in place of SAP, typically for around half the current SAP maintenance fee, often on three-year contracts. For a large estate that can mean savings of several million a year. The established providers are Rimini Street, which is the largest and supports thousands of clients including many Fortune 500s, and Spinnaker Support, which positions itself as a higher-touch alternative with dedicated engineers and a strong reputation on complex ECC environments. Smaller and regional firms such as Support Revolution serve specific markets. The trade-off is that you step off SAP's roadmap and rely on the third party rather than SAP for fixes and updates, and the commercial relationship with SAP can become more difficult. Customers who take this route have usually decided to delay or skip S/4HANA, which makes them a multi-year ECC population. Stay on ECC unsupported. The cheapest path on paper and the riskiest in practice, given the security and compliance exposure. It is rarely a deliberate strategy for a large regulated business, but it happens by drift. Where DVW helps, whichever path you takeEverything above explains a question customers keep asking: how do we keep getting value out of SAP while the migration question hangs over us? You do not have to wait for the S/4HANA project to answer it. DVW helps the customers who are staying on ECC and the customers who are moving to S/4HANA, and for a simple reason: the same connection works against both. DVW Analytics builds the connectors that let an analytics or automation platform read from and write to SAP directly. The promise is plain: read and write SAP data from any analytics or data platform. Two things make that matter here. First, reading and writing together: plenty of tools can pull data out of SAP for reporting, far fewer can write validated data back into it, and most of the work below needs both directions. Second, the same connection runs against ECC and S/4HANA alike, including private cloud and RISE, so nothing you build on ECC today is thrown away when you eventually move. If you are staying on ECCFor the large group that will sit on ECC for years yet, the practical question is how to keep improving now rather than waiting on a timeline you do not control. This is the "composable" approach in action: keep ECC as the core, and put modern analytics and automation around it. That matters most where end of support bites first. ECC keeps running after 2027, but SAP stops shipping the legal and tax updates that finance, tax and audit teams rely on. DVW does not replace those updates, but it gives those teams a way to compensate: stronger reporting, tighter reconciliation, and automated controls built directly on live SAP data, so issues are caught and evidenced rather than missed. The same connectors also automate manual SAP work and reduce the reliance on scarce SAP specialists. For customers who have moved to third-party support and freed up budget in the process, this is a direct way to put some of that saving to work. If you are migrating to S/4HANAFor customers who are moving, the hardest part is rarely the software, it is the data. DVW covers the data work phase by phase:
Because the same connection works on both systems, the profiling, controls and automation you build before the move carry straight over to S/4HANA afterwards. The work earns its keep twice. For the full breakdown of how DVW handles each phase, see our SAP data migration page. One connector for your platformWhichever path you are on, DVW meets you in the platform your team already uses, plus a standalone option if you would rather run SAP integration on its own:
Wherever you are on the journey to S/4HANA, and whether you are going at all, DVW is here to help you get more out of SAP in the meantime. Sources
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