ECC should have been dead long ago

I will never forget the curious situation at the New York Stock Exchange a very long time ago when Professor Hasso Plattner, ex-SAP CEO Bill McDermott and ex-SAP Chief Technology Officer Bernd Leukert presented the then new ERP S/4 based on Hana. It was a solid presentation.

But SAP did not want to talk about its own merits alone. The then CFO of the chemical giant Bayer was invited as a guest speaker. Bayer was already a long-standing and loyal SAP customer at the time. The customer presentation also began in the spirit of Hasso Plattner and SAP.

The CFO thanked him for the good and very successful cooperation. As the exciting presentation progressed, however, doubts arose about the topic itself: The analysts and journalists present were expecting a presentation on the current SAP release Business Suite 7 and the anticipation of S/4.

But the CFO praised R/3 above all else. He told of his comfortable situation, that after ten years of customizing, all of Bayer's well over 100 country offices were now working with R/3 across the board, that there were no longer any Excel sheets with outdated data, and that he therefore finally no longer had any worries about true costs and consistency. It was a song of praise for R/3 that could not have been better imagined.

Even then, SAP could have guessed that the release upgrade to S/4 would not be completed before 2030 - at a time when the technical IT construct of S/4 had long since become obsolete. So while SAP would have preferred to forget the successful R/3 and talk Suite 7 to death, the German-speaking SAP User Association intervened and declared SAP Business Suite 7 with AnyDB to be a sufficient and suitable platform for the upcoming digital transformation.

SAP then also put a good face on the matter and postponed the end of maintenance for ERP/ECC 6.0 with AnyDB from 2025 to 2030. But, it seems, they did the math without the host. In 2030, S/4 will be completely technologically obsolete.

Many existing SAP customers will continue to operate the stable Suite 7 with Oracle, IBM DB2 or SQL Server, but will feel little motivation to migrate to a technology that is then more than ten years old - they would rather try something really new right away. SAP will not be able to avoid presenting a 2040 roadmap with an S/4 successor in the near future. (pmf)