On Monday I wrote about the commitments SAP handed the European Commission on 9 July, and about the fact that “implementation failure” is now a line item in a document a regulator enforces. If you missed that one, read it first. This post is part two.
In it I said the commercial installation split was the piece I wanted to get my hands on. The framework that lets you cut your landscape into separate parts and pick a different level of SAP support for each one, including no SAP support at all for a part you choose.
I have spent two days thinking about what that means for a real Finance landscape, and I want to put the uncomfortable conclusion up front.
The split is not a procurement decision. It is a data decision. And it does not belong to your sourcing team.
The question your architect is about to get
Here it is, almost word for word, because it is already being asked in three programmes I know of:
“Can we just put the old ECC box on cheap support?”
You know the box. The production system you are keeping alive after go-live. Statutory history. The open items nobody wanted to migrate. The prior-year comparatives. The tax auditor who is going to come asking in 2031 and will not care what your future-state architecture diagram says.
It is not part of your target landscape. It is part of your obligations.
On paper it is the perfect candidate for its own commercial installation with no SAP support. In practice, you cannot answer the question yet, and here is why.
Four questions you probably cannot answer today
- Is anything still posting in it?
A system with no SAP support is a system you cannot patch. A system you cannot patch is a system you should not be posting in. That is not a licensing opinion, it is an audit position. So the first gate is binary: is that box read-only after cutover, or is it not? “Mostly read-only” is not an answer. One company code still running a monthly manual accrual is enough to fail the gate.
2. What is still reading out of it?
This is the one that catches people. Central Finance replicating from ECC. Group reporting extractors. The BW chain that half the FP&A pack still depends on. The interface someone built in 2019 that nobody documented.
If Central Finance is still pulling documents out of that system, it is not an archive. It is live infrastructure with a misleading name, and you cannot put live infrastructure on no support.
3. What does retention actually require, the data or the system?
These are two different obligations and almost everybody conflates them.
In the Netherlands the general administration retention period is seven years, and ten for data tied to immovable property. In Germany it is ten. Your tax authority wants the records, in a readable and auditable form, with the context to interpret them. It has never once asked to log into your ECC box.
That distinction is the whole ballgame. SAP Information Lifecycle Management exists exactly for this: archive the data with a retention rule attached, move it to an ILM Retention Warehouse that runs independently of the live application, and switch the source system off. Not “keep the source system on a cheap contract”. Switch it off.
If you have done that work, you do not need a commercial installation for the old box. You do not need the old box.
4. What breaks the first time you stop patching?
Legal change packages. This is the one that will bite a Finance system hardest and fastest.
A finance system without SAP support does not get the next VAT rate change, the next country’s e-invoicing format, the next year-end legal change note. If that box still issues a document, files a return, or produces a statutory report, an unsupported installation is not a saving. It is a compliance gap with an invoice attached.
While we are here, the dates
There is a lot of noise in the market this week, so let me put the actual clock on the table, because half the questions I am getting are really questions about the deadline.
Mainstream maintenance for the last three enhancement packages of ECC 6.0 ends on 31 December 2027. After that you can buy extended maintenance for three years, until 31 December 2030, at a premium of two percentage points on your maintenance basis. If you do not take it, or when it runs out, you drop into customer-specific maintenance. And S/4HANA carries SAP’s innovation commitment: at least one release in maintenance until the end of 2040.
None of those dates moved on 9 July. Not one.
Customer-specific maintenance is also where a lot of wishful thinking lives. It is not “support, but cheaper”. You get existing corrections for problems SAP already knows about. You do not get new legal change packages. Your VAT rate change, your next e-invoicing format, your next year-end note: that is now your problem, and it is why an unsupported or customer-specific finance system is a different animal from an unsupported warehouse system.
What the decision table looks like
Take a landscape of the kind I run into often. I am describing a pattern, not a client.
Four boxes.
The ECC production system, frozen at cutover, read-only, no company code still posting, Central Finance disconnected, data archived under an ILM policy. That one is a genuine candidate. Own installation, no SAP support, and honestly, once you get that far, you should be asking why it is still switched on at all.
The second box, the one Finance still runs prior-year comparatives out of because nobody rebuilt those two reports in S/4HANA yet. Not a candidate. Not until the reports move. That is a four-week job that has been on the backlog for a year, and it is now blocking a five-figure annual saving. Suddenly it is worth doing.
The BW system, feeding a handful of dashboards nobody has looked at since the new embedded analytics went live. Probably a candidate. Go and check who actually opens them first.
And the legacy box for the acquired entity that is still posting its own AR, because the integration slipped twice. Absolutely not, and everyone in the room already knew that.
Notice what just happened. To use the flexibility SAP has now committed to, you had to build an inventory of what posts where, what reads what, and what your retention policy really demands. That inventory is the single most useful document in a transformation programme, and hardly anyone has one.
Where I am honest with you
I have not seen a contract. Neither has anyone else yet.
I want to know how SAP defines an installation in the small print. Is it a system ID, a landscape, a licence bundle? What happens when one licence metric is shared across two boxes you now want to support differently? That is exactly the kind of detail that decides whether this is a real option or a nice paragraph, and I am not going to tell a client to bank on it until I have read it.
I also have not run an ILM decommissioning end to end on a landscape that was mid-S/4HANA build, with the old system still half-connected. I have seen it done cleanly after a programme finished. During one is a different animal, and I would want to be careful about promising the timeline.
The verdict
I like this change. It is the first time in years SAP has given customers a commercial lever that a well-run shop can actually pull, and the direction of it is right.
But look at what it rewards. The customer who can split the estate and take a part off support is the customer who already knows what lives in every box, already archived properly, already cut the interfaces. The customer who cannot answer those four questions gets nothing from this decision except a meeting.
Same lesson as everything I have written this past month, only pointing the other way. Usually it is SAP handing you a shiny new capability that your foundation is too weak to carry. This time SAP is handing you money, and your foundation still decides whether you are allowed to pick it up.
So do the data work. Not because of the commitments. Because the day you can answer “what is still posting in that system” is the day you actually control your landscape, and the support saving is just what falls out of it.
Where is your old box in this table? Let me know in the comments, I am curious how many of you can honestly answer question two.
Sources
SAP News Center, Stefan Steinle, “Evolving Our Maintenance and Support Practices to Deliver Greater Flexibility for SAP Customers”, 9 July 2026: https://news.sap.com/2026/07/evolving-maintenance-support-practices-greater-flexibility-sap-customers/
