I came across this news that says SAP will end its support for ECC 6 by 2027.
If true, how is this affecting consultants and consulting firms in general? Does this mean more business for consulting firms? Are we going to see surge in migration?
Does this mean companies with ECC 6 will be left with no option other than moving to S/4 HANA?
Deloitte Accenture EY PwC IBM Infosys CGI Tata Consultancy
SAP will likely extend it again, will negotiate with customers still on ECC 6 to buy extended support at a premium cost, or 3rd parties will jump in and provide extended support.
I wish. We still see some major orgs running consolidations and ERPs on some proprietary command line like systems where the manufacturer/developer is LONG out of business/no longer existent.
This doesn’t mean that firms need to upgrade - they just won’t get support from SAP if something goes wrong. Basically SAP is trying to force them to upgrade to HANA.
And yes, one can assume firms still on ECC6, would need some assistance migrating to HANA. This is probably a bigger portion of business than companies switching to SAP from a different ERP.
Why do people from EY think HANA is an ERP system and not a database? Is it that hard to understand product names?
Director 1, I wasn’t even aware that SAP HANA and SAP S/4 HANA are not the same.
Yeah and you were born talking about ACDOCA instead of your ABCs
Take the date with a grain of salt, a few years ago they were saying they would end support closer to 2023-2024 but they keep pushing it out.
But overall yes, the increased pressure on clients using ECC will create more projects
Not much will change. SAP will extend again at premium cost. There isn't much of a business case for clients to goto SAP S4HANA. If ECC works they will stick till it breaks. As long as you can receive, ship and close books you are fine.
They will extend again
Like they annonced that BW will subset in 2025.
Tbh, its quite unrealistic of them
Just means their support will stop.
Some companies will keep running it in house long after support has ended. My current client is moving off of a mainframe system they’ve had for 30+ years right now. My last client was in similar boat.
That’s why it always amuses me when people say SAP / Oracle skills are a fading commodity.
IMO most important skill is being able to build relationships and trust with client. Lot of people seem to think that if a resource knows SAP that they can lead a SAP workstream but have seen a lot of pure technical resources fail. You need to be able to understand a clients challenges, explain to them leading and standard practice, and get them onboard with a new process.
Knowing configuration is nice but quite honestly that’s the easiest thing to learn how to do on the fly. SAP has solid help guides and support for almost everything standard so anyone with a willingness to put time in to learn can figure out how to configure a module.
Harder for people to gain the soft skills in my experience and it’s why I often staff my projects from the consulting side of Accenture vs technology.
Thank you fishes!
So, some of us think this date will be further pushed out and some of us are saying that we will see rise in migration from ECC to S/4 HANA.
Nobody of us really know the answer. Time will tell.