The following partner insight was authored by Willy Brinkmann, Chief Operating Officer at SEIDOR.

I spent 17 years at SAP before moving to the partner side, and across that entire career, I’ve watched the same cycle play out. SAP has extended deadlines before, leading some customers to view waiting as justified. However, focusing on whether the current ECC deadline will change distracts from the core issue.

Remaining on ECC limits your ability to take advantage of the innovation happening in the cloud right now, and that matters more than before because the pace of change in AI, automation, and data-driven decision-making isn’t slowing to accommodate anyone’s migration timelines. Companies should ask, why not now?

When I talk to organizations that still haven’t started their transition, the reasons vary but tend to follow familiar patterns. Some cite the complexity of the undertaking and a fear of disruption to ongoing operations. Others say they don’t have the resources or the budget this year, and plan to revisit the question next cycle. In some cases, the business simply isn’t pressuring IT for innovation, which creates a comfort zone where there’s no internal catalyst for change. 

These are all understandable positions, but they share a common problem: every one of them gets more expensive with time, not less.

I try to redirect those conversations toward a concrete comparison between what happens if you wait and what happens if you act. The cost of inaction grows quietly while the market moves forward, and decisions should be based on value and timing, not fear or doubt.

A Tightening Talent Market

One dynamic that doesn’t get enough attention in the ECC conversation is the structural strain on the SAP consulting ecosystem, which has significant implications for any company planning a migration in the next 12 to 18 months.

Over the past two or three years, the ecosystem has experienced a wave of mergers and acquisitions spanning every major region. Most of these deals involved large SAP channel partners or system integrators acquiring mid-size firms. 

While some will tell you the motivation was mid-market expansion, I’d argue the real driver is consultant power. These acquirers are buying talent that is ready to deploy immediately, because training and enabling new consultants from scratch takes longer than the current demand cycle allows.

The competing pressures on that finite talent pool are substantial. A significant number of very large enterprises still haven’t migrated off ECC at all, and their projects require deep, sustained consulting resources.

Meanwhile, SAP continues to sell thousands of new-name licenses every year to companies that have never run the software. Every one of those implementations requires its own consulting resources, which means companies that have never touched SAP are competing for the same talent pool as everyone trying to migrate to SAP Cloud ERP.

For companies that choose to wait, the consequence is longer lead times, more competition for qualified resources, fewer viable partner options, higher costs, and higher project risk. Mid-market companies will feel this most acutely, considering the available capacity is being absorbed by large, complex engagements first.

Acting Wisely, and Acting Now

Urgency without good judgment creates its own problems, and two of the most consequential decisions a company will make early in this process are the deployment path and the degree to which it’s willing to standardize.

Whether public or private cloud is the right path depends on too many variables—how many countries you operate in, what localizations and scope items are available in those geographies, and where your competitive differentiation lives within your processes—to answer with a default. The recommendation has to come from the business reality, not the other way around.

The same is true of the “adopt, don’t adapt” question. Adoption-first works well when a company is willing to standardize the parts of its operation that aren’t actually driving competitive advantage. But it falls apart when you’re dealing with mission-critical processes that make the business what it is, or with regulatory requirements that standard solutions simply can’t accommodate.

I’ve seen this go wrong firsthand. A company will tell you during the planning phase that they’re committed to maintaining a clean core, that their differentiation only lives in a handful of processes, and everything else is fair game. Then the project reaches their department, and suddenly every process is essential and workflow is unique. 

That kind of resistance will sink an implementation regardless of the technology behind it, and no amount of change management fixes it if the executives sponsoring the project aren’t willing to hold the line.

For adoption-first to actually work, three things need to be in place:

• Strong executive alignment on where the company truly differentiates and where it can standardize
• A mindset shift across the business, away from “we’ve always done it this way” and toward industry best practices
• Governance discipline to prevent customization from creeping back in through the side door

Without all three, even the best technology will struggle to deliver results. Sometimes it’s the manager, not the management approach, that needs to change.

The choice of implementation partner deserves the same rigor. Most companies focus their evaluation on cost and timeline, which matter, but leave critical questions unasked.

• Does this partner have proven experience in your specific industry?
• Have they completed these migrations successfully, and can they connect you with references?
• Do they have the capacity to deliver consistently across multiple geographies?
• Can they drive adoption across your organization and see it through beyond the technical go-live?

Choosing the wrong partner becomes especially painful when problems surface mid-project, as they often do. Last year, SEIDOR took over two troubled projects. In both cases, we started from the beginning, because a new partner can’t simply pick up where someone else left off. 

Beyond the hard-dollar cost of that kind of reset, the deeper damage is organizational. When your people go through a failed implementation, the fatigue and erosion of trust make the next attempt exponentially harder.

Trust in a migration partnership means the customer knows exactly where they stand at every stage of the journey. They have a detailed plan for every phase, the right talent assigned to the right tasks, fast resolution of issues as they arise, clear milestones, and transparent reporting. 

What SEIDOR promises is clarity, control, no hidden costs, and no last-minute surprises. It comes down to setting the right expectations from day one and then consistently delivering on them, because trust is gained in drops and lost in buckets.

The window to act on your own terms is narrowing. Don’t wait for it to close.

Willy Brinkmann is Chief Operating Officer at SEIDOR.