For the past two years, boards have been told that December 2027 is a cliff. SAP ends mainstream support for ECC then, and the accepted wisdom is that missing the deadline is an existential risk to be avoided at almost any cost. I'd argue the opposite: for many of the thousands of companies still running ECC, the most rational move is to miss it on purpose.
The market is already voting
The German-speaking SAP user group DSAG surveyed 198 senior leaders between December 2025 and January 2026. Nearly half plan to stay on ECC until 2030; only 37 percent are targeting 2027, and 4 percent are looking at 2033. This isn't denial. It's arithmetic.
The deadline is pricing, not value
Extended support costs a 2 percent premium per year through 2030. That is a rounding error next to the cost of a rushed re-platform. ISG's study of 200 large organizations found nearly 60 percent of S/4HANA migrations run late and over budget — and 49 percent do little or no process re-engineering. That's the real failure mode: a lift-and-shift that preserves every legacy process and data problem, then hands you a new bill for the privilege.
Airbus runs a patchwork of R/3 4.6 and ECC 6.0 and told The Register it may not finish by 2030. That's not incompetence — it's the sober recognition that the risk of changing badly exceeds the risk of staying.
The real risk isn't 2027
The risk worth managing is going live with a platform that changes nothing. ISG warns that fragmented processes and legacy data constrain which AI use cases can be deployed after migration. In other words, you can hit the deadline and still be locked out of the benefits you were promised.
Separate the vendor's support calendar from your transformation calendar. If you can't articulate what S/4HANA concretely changes in how the business runs, paying the 2 percent and waiting isn't delay — it's discipline.