SAP has announced a final five-month extension for customers still transitioning away from usage of S/4HANA Compatibility Packs in their data centers.
While usage rights had been initially set to expire at the end of last year, on December 31, 2025, this transition period will allow customers in the process of moving from SAP ERP to SAP S/4HANA to continue operating certain classical functionalities from their legacy SAP ECC systems through May 31, 2026, as they shift to native capabilities.
For most customers on Compatibility Packs, usage rights expired Dec. 31, as has been previously communicated to customers, partners and user groups and is documented in SAP Note 2269324. Past this expiration date, most customers still using Compatibility Packs are using unsupported and unlicensed software, placing them in commercial non-compliance and at risk during IT audits. The five-month extension is only applicable to those customers who've already begun transitioning.
"To counter for the fact that despite the extensive communication several customers still need some more time to manage this transition, SAP is offering this final transition period in an effort to provide customers with greater choice and flexibility," SAP noted in its announcement.
Accompanying this extension, SAP said it will offer tailored programs for customers moving to SAP Cloud solutions, which will replace the Compatibility Pack functionalities. Affected customers should contact their SAP representative for further information.
First introduced by SAP in 2016, Compatibility Packs were designed to ease migration and maintain business continuity for customers moving to S/4HANA on-premises, allowing them to retain functionality that either was not present in the initial release of S/4HANA or would have taken additional time to migrate. SAP maintains any missing functionality was delivered in the 2023 release of SAP S/4HANA, after which point the company established an end-of-2025 deadline for Compatibility Packs usage rights and support for those customers who've not selected RISE with SAP or another SAP Cloud ERP transition path to the cloud.
For those customers uncertain about their present usage, SAP Readiness Check analyzes Compatibility Pack usage on ECC and S/4HANA systems.
"As SAP continues to support those customers migrating to S/4HANA, this five-month Compatibility Pack usage extension for customers who've already started their transition comes as a welcome acknowledgment from SAP that such migrations are complex, time-consuming endeavors," said ASUG CEO & Chief Community Champion Geoff Scott, responding to the announcement.
"To guard against any potential business disruption, CIOs should take advantage of this grace period to connect with their SAP representatives, leverage SAP's dedicated services to identify any Compatibility Pack functions still in use by their organizations, and take active steps to replace these or migrate them to corresponding SAP Cloud solutions."