There are roughly twenty-three months of standard maintenance left on SAP ECC, and a substantial proportion of the installed base has not started moving. The interesting part of that sentence is not the deadline, which has been known for years and extended once already. It is the arithmetic on the supply side. Migrations of any real complexity take eighteen to thirty-six months. The consultants capable of running them are a finite population. Those two facts collide somewhere in the second half of this year, and the price of a migration is going to be set by scarcity rather than by scope.
The deadline is not the constraint. The constraint is the number of people who have done this before, and every month of delay from here reduces both their availability and your negotiating position
Here is what late movers should actually do, which is not the same as what they are being sold.
What happens to pricing between now and the deadline
Three things, all unfavourable to the buyer. Day rates rise as demand concentrates. This is already visible in the market for experienced migration leads and it will get worse as the remaining population of unmoved customers acts simultaneously. Lead times extend. The practical effect is that a programme you want to start in the autumn begins in the winter, which pushes your go-live past the deadline regardless of how quickly you decide. Your leverage disappears. A buyer with twenty-four months of runway can negotiate scope, fixed price and personnel commitments. A buyer with nine months takes what is available.
The four realistic options, honestly assessed
Migrate now, aggressively descoped. Move to a standard configuration, defer the process improvements, accept that you are doing a technical migration rather than a transformation. Unromantic, deliverable, and the right answer for most late movers. Extended maintenance. Buy time at a higher support cost, on a clock that also ends. Legitimate as a bridge with a committed plan behind it, dangerous as a way of deferring the decision again. Third-party support. Cheaper, and it takes you off the vendor's roadmap and out of its regulatory update stream. Viable for a stable landscape you intend to replace eventually, poor for one that needs statutory changes. Replace rather than migrate. For mid-market landscapes, a different product is sometimes genuinely faster than an in-place migration, particularly where the existing configuration is heavily customised. Rarely evaluated because it feels like a bigger decision, and occasionally the cheapest.
| Option | Question |
|---|---|
| Technical migration | Can reduced scope cover critical operating and statutory requirements? |
| Extended maintenance | What terms and committed migration plan apply? |
| Third-party support | Who owns updates and regulatory changes? |
| Replacement | Does customization warrant another platform evaluation? |
Qualitative summary of this article's source text, not a measured outcome or performance estimate.
The mistake late movers make
They try to recover the delay by combining the migration with the transformation they should have done separately, on the theory that the disruption is already being absorbed. That doubles the scope at the moment when capacity is scarcest and timelines are tightest, and it is the most reliable way to miss the deadline entirely. Move first, improve afterwards — the improvements are cheaper on the new platform anyway.
Practical Guidance for Migration Contingency Planning
- Secure named personnel now, contractually, before rates move further.
- Descope to a technical migration; defer process change.
- Price extended maintenance as a known cost, not a fallback.
- Evaluate replacement seriously if the landscape is heavily customised.
- Fix the go-live date and let scope absorb the pressure.
- Inventory custom code early; it determines the real timeline.
- Assume partner lead times extend by a quarter from here.
- Get board approval for the contingency, not just the plan.
The Regional Angle
The first and sharpest regional issue is partner capacity, which is structurally thinner here than in Europe or North America. The Gulf market has a small number of firms with genuine large-scale migration experience, and those same firms are simultaneously serving government transformation programmes with deadlines of their own and considerable political weight behind them. A private-sector buyer competing for the same senior consultants in the second half of this year should assume it loses that competition, which argues for locking personnel commitments early and in writing rather than relying on a framework agreement. The second concerns localisation, which adds a workstream that European programmes do not carry and which late movers routinely underestimate. Saudi e-invoicing integration, Emirati corporate tax treatment, wage protection filing formats and Arabic statutory outputs all require configuration and testing on the new platform, and the specialists who do that work are an even smaller population than the general migration pool. Put the localisation workstream at the front of the plan rather than the end, because it is the one most likely to delay a go-live and the least likely to be recoverable by adding people. The third is about the decision itself, which in regional groups often sits with an owner or board rather than with a chief information officer holding delegated authority. That structure has an advantage worth using: a single decision-maker can commit in one meeting what a European committee takes a quarter to approve. Late movers here should exploit that rather than run the process as if consensus were required — the binding constraint is calendar time, and an organisation that can decide in February and contract in March has materially better options than one that decides in June.
The objection worth taking seriously
The strongest objection is that the deadline will move again. It has already been extended once, a large proportion of the installed base remains on the old platform, and a vendor facing the prospect of thousands of customers going unsupported or defecting to third-party support has strong commercial reasons to offer another accommodation — and has in fact already created transition arrangements for its largest and most complex customers. Buying a rushed, descoped migration at peak market rates in order to meet a date that may soften is the worst possible outcome. That is not an unreasonable bet, and the precedent supports it. The difficulty is that the bet is asymmetric in a way the deadline debate obscures. If the date holds and you waited, you are migrating at maximum scarcity with no leverage and no contingency. If the date moves and you went early, you migrated at a reasonable price with named consultants and have been on the current platform for two years. The downside of acting early is that you paid sooner than strictly necessary; the downside of waiting is a rushed programme on someone else's timetable. And note that any extension is likely to be priced and conditional rather than free, which makes it a cost line rather than a reprieve. Plan for the date, and treat an extension as an upside you did not need.
Common Questions
Is a technical migration without process improvement a wasted opportunity?
It is a deferred one. Process improvement on the new platform is cheaper and less risky than doing both at once under deadline pressure.
How much will rates actually rise?
Nobody can quote a reliable number, and vendors of migration services have an obvious interest in the answer. What is observable is that lead times for experienced leads are already extending, which is the earlier signal.
Is third-party support a real option?
For a stable landscape with no statutory change requirement, yes, as a bridge. It removes you from the update stream, which matters more in this region than in most because of the pace of tax and filing changes.
What should we expect over the next twelve months?
Expect senior migration capacity to be effectively booked out by the second half of the year. Expect the vendor to make further transition offers, priced rather than free. Expect a visible cohort of programmes that started too late and descoped mid-flight. And expect replacement decisions in the mid-market to become more common than the current market commentary suggests.
Migration Contingency Planning — we get your named consultants under contract before the market prices them out of reach.