The following guest perspective was authored by Joshua Greenbaum, Principal at Enterprise Applications Consulting.
There has been a lot of information from SAP and partners about what it calls “clean core” since its introduction almost three years ago, and the concept has been evolving ever since. The main definition has remained stable, nonetheless: a clean core is one in which essential business processes are based on a stable and largely immutable set of best practices, “hard-wired” in the cloud, that are used as the foundation for a company’s business functionality.
A clean core by itself is not meant to be modified except by the vendor—that’s the immutable part—but customers and partners can add new functionality in the form of extensions that allow a clean core system to support customers’ needs for competitive advantage and industry or country-specific requirements.
As 2025 comes to a close, it has become clear that some companies are still struggling with syncing this definition to their company’s cloud transformation strategy. To that end, I propose the following strategic baseline:
Setting your sights on a clean core is the best way to use cloud technology to meet your business needs today and in the foreseeable future.
Before taking a closer look at what clean core looks like with 2026 just around the corner, I want to parse this relatively straightforward-looking sentence down into its component elements, as there’s more than meets the eye to these 26 words.
Setting your sights: Clean core is a journey, not a fixed strategy. Unless you’re truly starting fresh from a greenfield implementation, your company will need to do a lot of cleaning of the core (or cores) that constitute your technology landscape over the next few years. Few companies can, or should, throw out their legacy systems in one fell swoop and start over with a net-new SAP Business Suite; buried in those older systems are often messy—if not downright dirty—legacy processes that still have value to your company. Your core cleaning activities will need to take place at a pace that makes sense for your company—not SAP or a partner.
The best way: Clean core may ultimately be the best way, but it’s not the only way to maximize the value of the cloud to meet your business requirements. Given that few companies can start fresh with a truly clean core, a hybrid cloud/on-premise approach often makes more sense. As such, your clean core strategy can and should include maintaining important elements of your business that are still running on older, legacy systems alongside your clean core systems.
Use cloud technology: This sentence doesn’t specifically mention “SAP cloud technology” for an important reason: If you’re going to truly meet your business needs, you’re likely to need your SAP clean core system to interoperate with your non-SAP systems. Most companies have significant investments in non-SAP systems that still impart competitive advantage and/or are deemed important to a core set of stakeholders who can’t be left in the lurch during a complex SAP clean core ERP migration. Failing to make these non-SAP systems an essential part of the journey to clean core is a sure way to fail the all-important change management process essential to a successful cloud migration.
Meet your business needs today and in the foreseeable future: SAP originally positioned clean core as a technological concept, but it has evolved to include a much-needed focus on remaining tightly aligned with a company’s line-of-business stakeholders. That alignment is expressed in part in the fit-to-standard workshops that have become an important component of SAP’s implementation methodology for RISE. As more companies confront the myriad business challenges of today’s global economy, aligning business stakeholders and their requirements closely to a clean core strategy has become an important way to ensure success.
Clean Core in 2026
With this framework in mind, I want to give a quick overview of what was new in the world of clean core in 2025 and what customers can look forward to in 2026 across four key strategic areas: business, technology, licensing, and people.
Business strategy. Several key events this fall are highlighting the need for better business stakeholder alignment, an increasingly essential part of any clean core journey. Last week’s SAP Connect Conference in Las Vegas incorporated elements of the former Ariba Live and Success Connect conferences; its intention was to bring business stakeholders into the conversation around using SAP Cloud to build and maintain business process excellence, specifically in five key line-of-business areas: finance, spend, HR, customer experience, and supply chain.
ASUG Tech Connect, which takes place in November in Louisville, will also have a strong focus on business stakeholder engagement, as Geoff Scott, ASUG CEO & Chief Community Champion, noted in a recent blog post. And SAP TechEd, taking place in Berlin concurrently, will also have a significant number of tracks devoted to helping enterprise architects use SAP’s growing business transformation toolchain in order to better align business requirements with cloud migration.
Licensing strategy. Getting clean core right means making sure that your company has the right licenses in place for both your legacy systems and your new SAP Business Suite systems. This has often been a complicated task, considering the many changes in the licensing of RISE and GROW over the last few years. Importantly, with the 2030 deadline for the end of support for ECC looming, the critical issue of managing a hybrid landscape—especially in the context of a clean core strategy—has become an area of concern for SAP customers running large, complex ECC systems.
Earlier this year, in recognition of this deadline, SAP announced a new licensing strategy to support customers whose journeys to the cloud may extend beyond 2030. This new regime, called SAP ERP, Private Edition, Transition Option, will allow customers with large ECC landscapes to continue to license ECC past the 2030 deadline. Just as implementing a hybrid landscape on the way to a clean core is an important option for customers, this new licensing regime represents a welcome evolution towards customer choice for SAP’s RISE strategy.
One key prerequisite for exercising this option involves moving the database component of a customer’s ECC system to the HANA database. There are a number of technical reasons for this, but most important is that SAP customers running the Oracle database underneath their ECC systems—Oracle being by far the largest purveyor of database systems to ECC customers—will no longer be supported by Oracle, effectively rendering their ECC systems unsupportable. There’s a similar problem with technology based on older versions of Java, another Oracle product for which support has effectively reached its end-of-life at the end of 2025.
If this option is of interest to your organization, SAP is providing significant incentives to sign up for it before the end of 2025, so the time to explore this is now.
Technology strategy. The technology aspects of managing an effective clean core strategy is increasingly one of SAP’s strategic strengths, particularly with respect to its SaaS competitors. The SAP business transformation tool chain (Cloud ALM, Signavio, LeanIX, and WalkMe) has become a linchpin in SAP’s clean core strategy. The toolchain’s ability, alongside SAP Business Technology Platform (BTP), to support the development, implementation, and management of the key components of clean core means customers can balance the need for fit-to-standard processes with the equally important (and at times contradictory) need to implement highly business-specific, customized processes that deliver competitive differentiation—the kind that cannot be found in fit-to-standard products from SAP or any other vendor.
BTP, as the platform for building these customizations, also plays an important role as the platform for the industry-specific functionality; and as such represents another key element in the competitive advantage SAP brings to the market. The fact that this functionality is not part of the core SAP Business Suite ERP system means that customers can use BTP to run advanced, industry-specific functionality within the context of the hybrid cloud/on-premise systems that RISE now actively supports.
SAP published a white paper earlier this year, Clean Core Business Processes for SAP S/4HANA Cloud, that provides specific guidance on how to design customizations—extensions, in the official parlance of SAP—that meet SAP’s clean core standards. These issues will also be covered at ASUG Tech Connect and SAP TechEd, and the Cloud ALM Summit in Darmstadt, Germany, later this month.
People strategy. Despite the technology and applications that SAP provides as part of the clean core journey, the bottom line for success with clean core will be wholly dependent on how customers manage the people side of their migration to the cloud, alongside their particular version of the journey to clean core. While the good news is that SAP is better positioned to engage with business stakeholders in designing and implementing a clean core, managing the people side of a clean core migration will still be the more difficult part of the journey.
In order for companies to successfully move their clean core strategies forward, three things need to happen:
- Enable more business stakeholder engagement. SAP and ASUG are providing more forums than ever for this type of engagement, and it’s up to customers to proactively take advantage of these opportunities. That means making it a point to send business stakeholders to relevant conferences—or at least giving them online access. (The SAP Connect Conference is over, but the keynotes can be found online here.) It also means empowering enterprise architects to access the information at conferences like ASUG Tech Connect and SAP TechEd (online or virtually) that will help them bridge the technology and business gaps that inhibit the realization of a clean core strategy.
- Continue to master the SAP toolchain and related technologies. This is an imperative for both IT and business stakeholders. The toolchain provides the means for understanding how to design, deliver, and monitor the core business processes that drive customer success, but that success can only be ensured through the engagement of business stakeholders alongside enterprise architects and other IT stakeholders in their development.
- Continue to master BTP. This needs to occur along three axes: BTP as the platform for industry-specific functionality, BTP as the platform for customizations, and BTP as the platform for supporting end-to-end processes, regardless of whether they are running in a “suite-first” (all-SAP) mode or in support of a more heterogeneous landscape. BTP has a growing number of APIs and business process scenarios that can support non-SAP systems, and SAP has been more vocal than ever about making sure customers know that maintaining interoperability between SAP and non-SAP systems is a viable and cost-effective option.
It’s clear 2025 has been an important year for consolidating and refining clean core around the reality of customers’ needs, and that practical approach will pay off in 2026 as more customers push forward with their clean-core cloud transformations.
The complexity of the global economy has made transformation more essential than ever: SAP’s refinements to its clean core strategy couldn’t have come at a better moment for its customers.
Joshua Greenbaum is Principal at Enterprise Applications Consulting.