With many SAP cus­tomers still in the process of mov­ing from their lega­cy sys­tems to SAP cloud solu­tions ahead of main­te­nance dead­lines for on-premis­es SAP ERP sys­tems, SAP plans to offer its cus­tomers more time to make the switch — pro­vid­ed that they com­mit to SAP in the long term via RISE with SAP.

In the sec­ond quar­ter of 2025, SAP will intro­duce an offer­ing called ​“SAP ERP, pri­vate edi­tion, tran­si­tion option,” a new cloud sub­scrip­tion ser­vice specif­i­cal­ly intend­ed to help large cus­tomers with com­plex instal­la­tions to suc­cess­ful­ly tran­si­tion from their lega­cy SAP ERP sys­tems to SAP cloud ERP through the RISE program. 

Con­trac­tu­al­ly avail­able in 2028, and to be active from 2031 – 2033, the offer­ing will be cen­tered on SAP ECC; while the eli­gi­ble scope of prod­ucts will be made clear lat­er this year, it is not expect­ed to include the full scope of SAP Busi­ness Suite 7 that is only avail­able for sub­scrip­tion until the end of 2030.

Also includ­ing a set of ded­i­cat­ed ser­vices aimed at help­ing cus­tomers trans­form to SAP cloud ERP, the new cloud sub­scrip­tion ​“will also sup­port busi­ness con­ti­nu­ity with patch­es for secu­ri­ty, legal and soft­ware issues,” accord­ing to Ste­fan Stein­le, Exec­u­tive Vice Pres­i­dent and Head of Cus­tomer Sup­port & Cloud Life­cy­cle Man­age­ment at SAP. 

As first report­ed by Ger­man busi­ness news­pa­per Han­dels­blatt and con­firmed by SAP CEO Chris­t­ian Klein late last month, dur­ing SAP’s Q4 and full-year earn­ings call and sub­se­quent tele­con­fer­ence, this option will not only pro­vide sup­port for cus­tomers approach­ing 2030 and the end of extend­ed main­te­nance for on-premis­es SAP ERP sys­tems but also offer them pro­tec­tion against poten­tial out­ages and oth­er risks posed by third-par­ty prod­ucts, such as old­er Java ver­sions and data­bas­es out­side of SAP HANA, which will no longer be sup­port­ed by their respec­tive vendors.

Sys­tems rel­e­vant to this tran­si­tion option will need to be moved to SAP ERP, pri­vate edi­tion, before the end of 2030, and addi­tion­al prepa­ra­tions rel­e­vant to no-longer-sup­port­ed third-par­ty tech­nol­o­gy, such as old­er ver­sions of Java, will be required. The SAP HANA data­base is the only sup­port­ed data­base for this tran­si­tion option.

“To clar­i­fy, we would like to empha­size that this is not a main­te­nance pro­lon­ga­tion of SAP ERP. There are no changes for cus­tomers run­ning on-premise SAP ERP sys­tems after 2030,” added Stein­le. ​“The new offer­ing — SAP ERP, pri­vate edi­tion, tran­si­tion option — will come at an expand­ed fee in 2031 – 2033 com­pared to a com­pa­ra­ble ERP cloud sub­scrip­tion before 2031. Nat­u­ral­ly, due to the com­plex­i­ty in offer­ing such a ser­vice, this is tar­get­ed to larg­er and com­plex systems.”