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

It is worth sitting with how large a gap that is. SAP released the first version of S/4HANA back in 2015. That means the vendor has had roughly a decade, including a dedicated guided- transformation program (RISE with SAP, launched in 2021) and a program aimed specifically at mid-sized customers (GROW, launched in 2023), and still converted well under half of its installed base. As Di Capua put it to CIO magazine: SAP convinced less than half of its customers to migrate in fifteen years — expecting the remaining half to move in the final five is a very different kind of bet.

The reasons are not mysterious once you look at them directly. The two consistently cited barriers are the complexity of existing ECC installations, many of which carry a decade or more of custom code and business-process modification, and the sheer cost of the exercise: Gartner's own client conversations put migration costs anywhere from around $2 million for a straightforward case up to $1 billion for the largest, most heavily customized enterprise landscapes. Some clients are working through multi-year, three-to-seven-year migration horizons that include a genuine process redesign rather than a like-for-like technical lift.