SAP ECC 6.0 lives to fight another decade under Rimini Street

Third-party provider pledges to support legacy ERP until 2040

Enterprise software support specialist Rimini Street has announced that it will continue to support SAP's ECC 6.0 until 2040, more than ten years after the German vendor plans to retire support for the legacy ERP platform.

The extension also applies to S/4HANA, SAP's current ERP platform, which the software vendor says it will also support until that date.

In 2020, SAP pushed back the mainstream support deadline for customers using its Business Suite 7 (BS7) applications – including the ERP software SAP ECC 6.0 – from 2025 until 2027, with extended support available until 2030 at a 2 percent premium, following pressure from users.

ECC remains the cornerstone of ERP estates across some of the world's largest companies, which might have invested hundreds of millions of dollars and years of work in adopting the system. Gartner estimates that over 60 percent of SAP customers remain on ECC 6 on-premises with no decision yet to move, while by 2030, four in ten SAP ECC customers today will still use ECC in key business areas.

Speaking to The Register, Rimini Street CEO Seth Ravin said that the risk and cost of moving away from ECC meant many SAP customers were likely to stay with the platform.

"Even against S/4HANA, ECC is more proven and has more functional capability," Ravin told us. "It's been deployed long enough for tens of thousands of customers to build ecosystems of software around it. They have hundreds of interfaces. These are some of the world's largest complex manufacturers. The cost to rip that out and replace it with S/4HANA is immense. But it's not just the cost. It is the risk. If you know manufacturers, when you get an assembly line, you've got a production line, and you're feeding IoT data from machines into your ERP system, the risk of ripping that out and replacing it is a massive potential risk to disruption of the shop floor. Those are the factors that weigh in, and why so many companies haven't licensed S/4HANA."

Rimini Street says the deal would offer total annual maintenance savings of up to 90 percent against SAP support for ECC and S/4HANA.

In January 2021, SAP launched RISE with SAP, a lift-shift-and-transform commercial package to encourage ECC customers to upgrade their main ERP system and move to the cloud at the same time, in partnership with systems integrators and cloud hyperscalers.

But in recent months, Gartner has pointed out that standard service levels for RISE were below industry norms of 99.9 percent uptime, while anything above that might come at a 50 percent premium.

In August 2023, CEO Christian Klein angered some users after he told investors that SAP's newest innovations, including AI agents, would only be delivered in the SAP public and private clouds using RISE with SAP.

However, Ravin said users could stay with on-premises ECC and benefit from AI agent technologies by implementing a service layer on top of SAP, such as the one provided through Rimini Street's partnership with ServiceNow, as CEO Bill McDermott told The Register in 2022.

Meanwhile, Rimini Street offers five nines uptime, and commits to a resolution time, Ravin said. "SAP is trying to push you to S/4HANA on RISE with SAP. It is one thing to offer options. But it is another to start dictating to everyone, because you want to control the environment and say that if you don't go to RISE and you're not on S/4HANA you're not going to get AI and so on."

He argued that in partnership with ServiceNow, Rimini Street could give ECC users "all the AI features, automation, and single pane of glass on enterprise AI, all on your existing systems."

The S/4HANA platform is already ten years old, albeit with a number of upgrades. By the time extended support runs out, it will have been around for 15 years. At that point, ECC users might want to consider whether they need to move to a new ERP platform at all, Ravin said.

"We believe that this new orchestration layer that's going over the apps means we're building processes out of microservices and APIs, and we won't need the underlying ERP software in the years ahead. We're going to put in agentic AI to run and connect those processes," he said.

By comparison, moving to S/4HANA is just "an upgrade of the existing software" rather than transformation as such, Ravin argued.

As an example, Rimini Street offered Apsen Farmacêutica, a Brazilian pharmaceutical manufacturer it helped implement ServiceNow over an existing ECC ERP system. In a statement, CIO Renan Santos said SAP's decision to end mainstream ECC support in 2027 left the company with a choice: "Either take on the cost, disruption, and risk of migrating to S/4HANA or reimagine our existing system to become an innovation platform."

Speaking to The Register in May, Alessandro Galimberti, Gartner senior director analyst and expert in public cloud Infrastructures, said ECC users had the option to move their software to the cloud, and use analytics and AI technologies from cloud providers, connecting them with APIs.

"It's not going to be integrated," Galimberti told us. "But it's a potential comparable feature, or even if you are in RISE with SAP you might want to look at this strategy to limit your lock-in. These options are not mutually exclusive. If you move with SAP, if you keep your SAP on-prem, or you move your SAP into a specific cloud provider, you can use all this extensibility from the other cloud providers as well. Try to use the best tool for the job."

Rimini Street's vision of removing ERP altogether, replacing it with AI agents and microservices, might take a while to materialize, if at all.

A recent study from the Salesforce AI Research team found AI agents only achieve around a 58 percent success rate on tasks that can be completed in a single step.

Business processes run only by AI agents and microservices might be "all very Star Trek" to some users, said Paul Byrne, SAP program director at advisory company Dragon ERP. While users were already working on "composable ERP" joining processes provided by different vendors in the cloud, integrating them can be complex.

"Functionally and technically, it will work. Yes, AI should be able to do it, but it doesn't all sew together so easily. AI agents and APIs and everything: somebody's got to set it up and keep it working," he said.

Byrne also noted that SAP has already agreed to extend support for ECC until 2033, under special circumstances and provided the customer signed up to RISE with SAP in advance. Byrne suggested these agreements were likely covered by NDAs.

Nonetheless, with SAP offering some flexibility and Rimini Street offering third-party support until 2040, ECC users – especially the largest global businesses – might be tempted to bide their time and see what emerges before they jump on the RISE with SAP bandwagon. ®