ECC Apocalypse, Sweating your legacy SAP assets until 2030
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31st December 2025 is fast approaching……
At a time of global economic uncertainty and the impact of maturing AI technology, many SAP customers are hesitant to moving to SAP S/4HANA for a myriad of reasons.
Many existing SAP customers who have decided to stick with SAP ECC are now faced with the fast approaching 31st December 2025 maintenance deadline, whereby they will need to either migrate to SAP S/4HANA or Upgrade to SAP ECC Enhancement pack 6+.
Moving to SAP S/4HANA RISE (Private or Public cloud) is a highly evasive business change programme, that comes at considerable cost and resource impact with little upfront tangible benefit, and will take focus away from other business priorities.
Sweating your SAP Investment the immediate benefits
Implementing SAP is an organisational Generational investment enabling long term continuous improvement too the organisations operating model.
The continuous improvement in the form of custom code (customisation) has enabled the operating model to become optimised and automated, and that investment is still delivering benefits today.
At the same time most of the intelligent new business value that can be gained from SAP does not reside in the core S/4HANA ERP solution.
It therefore makes economic and innovation sense to stay on SAP ECC for as long as possible, whilst leveraging the latest intelligent tech by way of plug and play to provide continuous business innovation and benefit realisation.
ECC Upcycling
Your current SAP ECC system can be upcycled to enable you to sweat your current SAP assets until 2030+, removing the need for significant organisational disruption.
Enabling the business to then focus on pragmatic AI driven process and data innovation leveraging the best of the cloud (SAP Cloud, hyper-scalers platform as a service, wider enterprise cloud). We call this Digital Kaizen.
This can be achieved through accelerated plug and play innovation, which will deliver CFO’s rapid tangible EBIDTA and Liquidity benefits.
Dragon ERP will help CFOs and CIO’s, maximise their SAP investment through ECC upcycling….
Fire Power SAP Upgrade
Designed to help customers manage every aspect of their SAP ECC Upgrade delivery journey from initiation, through delivery and closure.
Define the ECC and wider SAP application upgrade path to 2030 based upon business priorities, capacity, capability, capital – Phase 0 Roadmap.
Pain and Gain, helps business leaders Identify business pain points and areas of business innovation that can be enabled through Intelligent upcycling, People, Process, Tech, Data, AI.
Simplify ICT, define and optimise the hosting and support strategy based upon a simplified and optimised SAP / legacy landscape.
Full fix and fail SAP ECC+ upgrade, which if required will include redocumentation of SAP system enabling testing, business change and ongoing support.
*Cloud and Application agnostic
SAP S/4HANA and RISE Positioning
SAP have set a clear direction, the S/4HANA path, wider SAP portfolio and GenAI adoption will be cloud centric.
This adds cost and complexity to SAP ECC and SAP S/4HANA On-premise or Cloud on Premise customers, as any move to SAP S/4HANA cloud will require a complex migration investment.
We anticipate that the SAP S/4HANA and wider SAP Cloud product portfolio will mature rapidly with the advent of GenAI, whilst the next major S/4 release is not until 31/12/25, SAP have indicated a constant release of new intelligent process innovation being added to the cloud portfolio.
We also believe, and we are already seeing the early signs that the means of Implementing / migrating to SAP will become automated using AI, a driver for this is the poor adoption of SAP S/4HANA by ECC customers to date, together with continued high rates of delivery failure and operational disruption.
A further consideration is the intelligent cloud innovation available from the major Cloud platform providers (Hyper-scalers) AWS, Goolge, Microsoft as well as a myriad of cloud apps that will transform your ability to rapidly innovate your operating model and take cost of your legacy data and ICT architecture
We also believe that the SAP Rise Commercial licensing model encompassing SaaS, IaaS and PaaS will morph further, it has changed twice in the last six months and one can expect further evolution.
By adopting an ECC upcycling strategy you, the customer are able to maximise the 31 December 2027 end of standard ECC maintenance milestone, to confirm your Future SAP consumption strategy and leverage the terms that add benefit to your long term business innovation strategy.
This provides you with 3 years to move to SAP S/4 in whatever form it exists in; at that point of time, an accelerated pace with less cost and risk of failure.
If you’re a CFO or CIO needing help mitigate the ECC Apocalypse, then contact Paul Byrne.
Dragon ERP, A SAP Target Operating model Innovation Integrator , changing the way organisations unlock the value of their SAP investment.
If you want to know more about how SAP is changing and how Dragon ERPs Plug and Play transformation methodology unlocks accelerated benefit realisation then contact a Dragon today.
https://dragonerp.co.uk/contact-us
About the Author:
Paul Byrne, Dragon ERP Co-founder is a SAP mentor and influencer with over
33 years’ experience in shaping the SAP journey for the global 2,000.