Full narration of the briefing. Click a section heading to jump the player to that moment.
Almost every RISE conversation starts with a date, so let us get it right, because the wrong reading of it is the most expensive belief in the SAP estate. On the thirty first of December 2027, SAP ends mainstream maintenance for Business Suite 7 and ECC. That is the precise event. Mainstream maintenance ends.
The software does not stop. Your systems keep running exactly as they did on the first of January 2028. What changes is the support you pay for and the patch and legal change stream you receive. Extended maintenance runs to 2030, and a fee paid window sits beyond that.
Daniel is going to explain why the difference between those two readings is worth so much money.
It is worth money because a buyer who believes the lights go out has no alternative, and a buyer with no alternative has no negotiation. That is the whole mechanism. Treated as a forced march, the 2027 date compresses your preparation, removes your options one by one, and hands the calendar to the other side. Treated correctly, as a contract date you plan backwards from, it is simply one input among several.
And notice that this is not a controversial claim. SAP has confirmed the extended maintenance window itself. The urgency is not in the vendor's own documentation, it is in the framing that arrives with the proposal, and those are very different things.
So what are the routes? Four of them are real. S/4HANA on your own infrastructure. RISE with SAP.
GROW with SAP for the smaller and more standard estate. And third party support, which is a genuine bridge rather than a permanent home for most buyers. And there is a fifth non option, which is doing nothing, and doing nothing is the only choice that is never right. The point of naming four is not that you will pick an unusual one.
Most large estates do end up on S/4HANA in some form. The point is that a buyer who has costed four routes negotiates a completely different deal from one who has costed one.
Now some numbers from the readiness work. Across roughly thirty to forty SAP 2027 engagements, first conversion quotes landed twenty five to forty percent above the figure the buyer could defend once real consumption was measured against the proposed bundle. That is not a negotiating position on our side, it is the observed gap between the opening number and the evidenced one. And it tells you what the first quote is: a starting point built on assumptions nobody has tested, most of them supplied by your own inflated user inventory.
It is not a price. It is an invitation to check.
And the strongest predictor of the outcome was when the buyer started. Those who opened the conversation inside twelve months of a contract event paid the most. The early movers, roughly twenty four months out, captured the best metric conversions. There is nothing mysterious in that.
At twenty four months every route is still executable, a brownfield conversion running twelve to twenty four months still fits, and you can build a real alternative. At ten months, none of that is true and everyone in the room knows it. So the runway is not project management, it is the negotiation, and it starts far earlier than most steering committees assume.
There is a second play running alongside the date, and it is quieter. Indirect access exposure surfaced in roughly three out of five estates, and where it surfaced it was used to push a larger RISE commitment than the workload justified. Think about how effective that is. An unpriced compliance exposure discovered mid conversion converts directly into scope, because the cleanest way to make it go away is to buy the bigger bundle.
Which is why session seven exists, and why the exposure gets quantified and settled before the conversion is negotiated rather than during it. Discovered late, it is leverage against you. Measured early, it is just a number.
Here is the move. Say out loud, internally, in the first meeting, that 2027 is a maintenance date and the systems keep running. Then build the extended maintenance and third party support bridge as a costed scenario, not as a threat, so your programme date is a choice rather than a hostage. And start twenty four months out, because everything in this series is executable at twenty four months and almost none of it is at ten.
The deadline compresses SAP too. Next time, Daniel and Claire take the five migration paths, and why choosing the one on their slide costs fifteen to twenty eight percent.
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. Want Redress to contact you? Reach out and we respond the same day.
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