Inside the Numbers: Why Nearly Half of SAP's ECC Customers Still Aren't Ready

Inside the Numbers: Why Nearly Half of SAP's ECC Customers Still Aren't Ready

Gartner's own tracking of the installed base shows a migration that is real, but nowhere near fast enough to clear the field before the deadline arrives.

SAP does not publish a running scoreboard of how many ECC customers have actually moved to S/4HANA. That silence is itself informative — Gartner analyst Fabio Di Capua has pointed out that a vendor sitting on good migration numbers usually can't wait to announce them. The numbers we do have come from independent tracking, and they tell a more sobering story than SAP's own marketing suggests.

As of the end of 2024, Gartner estimated that only 39% of SAP's roughly 35,000 ECC customers worldwide — about 14,000 organizations — had actually migrated to S/4HANA. At the migration pace observed at that time, Gartner's own projection was that roughly 17,000 organizations, nearly half of the entire ECC customer base, would still be running the legacy platform when the 2027 deadline arrived. More than a third, about 13,000 organizations, were projected to still be on ECC even in 2030, after extended maintenance itself runs out.