Majority of SAP's UK & Ireland customers still not ready to move to S/4HANA

But the company wants to withdraw support for its Business Suite range in 2025

Fifty-eight per cent of SAP customers in the UK and Ireland have no plans to upgrade to S/4HANA in the next two years.

That's according to the recent annual member survey conducted by the UK and Ireland SAP User Group (UKISUG), which asked 467 organisations about their plan to move to S/4HANA.

A further 27 per cent said they wouldn't move to S/4HANA in the next three years.

"There is a bit of a standoff," said UKISUG chairman Paul Cooper, who is also IT head at Burton's Biscuit Company.

"We are seeing lots of customers saying SAP will extend that 2025 deadline. But we're not hearing anything other than 'That is the deadline' from SAP," Cooper told the Register.

In last year's member survey, more than 30 per cent of the respondents said cost was a major concern stopping them from moving to S/4HANA, while 20 per cent said that the shift would require substantial change management at their organisation.

In 2014, German enterprise software firm SAP announced it would withdraw support for its Business Suite range in 2025. Specifically, that meant that SAP would no longer release updates and security patches or provide support resources for the product.

The company said that staying with old products would be more expensive in the longer term, and that it would be better for users to move to the cloud-based S/4HANA enterprise software, which includes ERP, HR, financial management, real-time analytics and in-memory databases.

However, SAP customers are not confident about the migration. Many, such as industrial vacuum manufacturer Edwards, are finding the business case for the move difficult to justify. Migrating to S/4HANA would require refurbishing infrastructure and installing HANA as a database.

Cooper is now urging SAP's incoming co-CEOs Christian Klein and Jennifer Morgan to take notice of customers' concerns.

"The relationship with us, SAP's customers, will need to be top of mind for the two new CEOs," said Cooper.

"Customer trust and confidence is a very fragile thing."

"I've heard many members say they fully expect SAP to extend the 2025 maintenance deadline for ECC6. There seems to be a potentially dangerous stand-off - the question is, who will blink first?"

Responding to customer's concerns, SAP said in a statement that it had already extended the end of support deadline for SAP Business Suite 7, but was ready to consider other changes.

"We are seeing a massive conversion to SAP S/4HANA, and we are confident that there is still plenty of time to move," the company stated.

"As always, SAP will not leave customers behind. Delaying, however, may be a less attractive solution from a cost perspective in the longer term."