Full narration of the briefing. Click a section heading to jump the player to that moment.
Every SAP negotiation in this cycle happens under one date: 2027, when mainstream maintenance for ECC ends. SAP will use that date to compress you. What they mention less is that the date compresses them too, because every ECC customer still undecided in 2027 is a miss on the most important migration target in the company's history. Preparation is what turns their deadline into your leverage.
Here are the five steps.
Step one. Understand the real deadline. ECC mainstream maintenance ends in 2027, but extended maintenance runs to 2030 at a premium, and third-party support extends the runway further for the estates that want it. Meanwhile, SAP holds discretionary migration assistance credits that it deploys when a deal looks at risk, and those credits are running roughly ten percent higher in 2026 than they will in 2027, because SAP wants commitments early.
The buyer who appears genuinely flexible on timing gets offered the money. The buyer who looks cornered pays list. The clock is real; whose neck it hangs on is negotiable.
Step two. Fix your user counts before SAP builds a proposal from them. RISE and S/4HANA proposals are priced from your current ECC landscape, and ECC user counts are almost always inflated: dormant accounts from leavers, duplicate identities across systems, and users classified into heavier license types than their actual activity supports. Every inflated user flows straight into the subscription metric and compounds for the whole term.
Run the usage analysis, retire the dormant accounts, reclassify by real activity, and only then let SAP measure. You are not cleaning data. You are setting the baseline for a decade of pricing.
Step three. Never accept SAP pricing as one number. A RISE or Cloud ERP proposal blends software subscription, hyperscaler infrastructure, managed services, and support into a single figure, and the blend is where margin hides: infrastructure sized generously, service tiers you did not choose, environments you will not use. Demand the decomposition, line by line, and benchmark each component against its own market: the infrastructure against hyperscaler rates, the services against managed-service providers, the software against reference deals.
A bundle you cannot decompose is a price you cannot challenge.
Step four. Give yourself somewhere else to stand. Three alternatives are credible enough to change SAP's posture: staying on ECC with third-party support while you decide, running S/4HANA on your own licenses and infrastructure instead of the full subscription bundle, and a phased migration on your calendar rather than theirs. You do not need to prefer any of them.
You need one of them costed, documented, and visible, because SAP prices urgency, and the cure for being priced as urgent is a written plan that proves you are not.
Step five. Control the calendar and pre-read the traps. SAP's quarter ends, and above all its December year end, move approvals worth 15 to 25 percent that mid-quarter meetings never see; time your close accordingly. And before anything is signed, hunt the three quiet mechanisms that define modern SAP paper: annual escalators that compound, automatic renewals that remove your leverage at the exact moment you need it, and credit forfeitures that expire value you thought you owned.
Preparation ends when those three are found, priced, and countered in your draft, not theirs.
One last point. At Redress Compliance we prepare and run SAP negotiations for large enterprises on a pure contingency basis. Our fee is 25 percent of what we save you. If we save you nothing, you pay nothing.
Before SAP measures your estate, let us look at it first. com.
Redress Compliance works on contingency: our fee is 25 percent of what we save you. Nothing saved, nothing paid. Independent, buyer side only, never vendor funded.
Talk to a SAP negotiator