SAP tosses some Compatibility Pack users a (short) lifeline

SAP is throwing a lifeline to customers who are running late on their transition away from S/4HANA Compatibility Packs in their data centers. Although usage rights were set to expire on December 31, 2025 for most users, SAP has announced a “final” five-month transition period for customers still using them to move to native capabilities.

Compatibility Packs were introduced in 2015 to allow customers shifting to S/4HANA on premises to retain functionality from their legacy SAP ECC (ERP Central Component) that was either not in the initial release of S/4HANA or that would have taken time to migrate. According to SAP, the missing functionality was delivered in the 2023 release of S/4HANA, and it said in a 2022 blog post, updated in 2025, that given this, Compatibility Pack usage rights, and support for them, would expire at the end of 2025 unless the customer had signed a Rise with SAP or SAP Cloud ERP deal and was making the move to the cloud.

But a number of customers needed extra time to complete their migrations, prompting the company to offer an additional extension until the end of May 2026, a SAP spokesperson said in an email. The company will also offer what it calls “tailored programs” to these customers to expedite the move to the cloud products that replace Compatibility Pack functions.

“We’re offering programs like transformation incentives and cloud extension policies, along with hands-on support from enterprise architects, AI-powered tools, and best-practice guidance for public cloud migrations,” the spokesperson sajd. “We also provide dedicated services to identify which compatibility pack functions a customer is using and help replace or migrate them to the recommended cloud solutions, ensuring a smooth transition without disrupting business operations.”

No reprieve for laggards

However, the extra five months are only being offered to customers who have already begun their transition. “We recently discovered that there are customers who have not even started. … Nothing has changed about their post-deadline options,” the spokesperson noted.

Analysts agree that the extension makes sense, though they see the move in different ways.

“SAP has a multitude of customers in the process of migrating from ECC/R3 to S/4 HANA, and those customers are still leveraging the functionality provided by various Compatibility Packs,” said Scott Bickley, advisory fellow at Info-Tech Research Group. “It would be quite the rug-pull for SAP to arbitrarily cut off support and use rights for these customers, resulting in potentially catastrophic disruptions to their internal and customer-facing business processes.”

And Gartner VP Analyst Mike Tucciarone views it as a purely practical move by SAP that “reflects the real-world hurdles organizations are facing today.” Gartner data shows that these compatibility pack issues came up in less than 1% of the thousands of SAP client calls analysts had in 2025, he said, “but for that 1%, it’s a serious issue. This extension acknowledges that these migrations are a big lift, especially when organizations today are focused on driving efficiencies and cost optimization.”

However, it shouldn’t be viewed as a policy change, said Sanchit Vir Gogia, chief analyst at Greyhound Research. “It’s a tightly framed grace period for customers who have already started their remediation journeys. That’s it,” he said. “SAP has chosen a path that appears flexible but is actually highly selective. This is a transition period, not a reprieve.”

Temporary scaffolding

SAP is using a calculated delay to manage customer pushback without compromising its long-term roadmap, he said. “The short duration of the extension makes that crystal clear. Five months is not about changing course. It’s about giving those in motion a chance to land safely, while reinforcing the message that Compatibility Packs were always temporary scaffolding.”

Gogia is also seeing CIOs waking up to the fact their organizations are still at risk, despite believing they had successfully completed their transitions. “Many assumed they were in the clear post-migration, only to discover Compatibility Pack elements still quietly active, sometimes flagged during internal readiness checks, sometimes triggered by SAP licensing audits, and occasionally revealed only during upgrade planning,” he said. “The risk here isn’t just technical. It’s financial, operational, and reputational. Once support ends, there’s nowhere to hide. SAP has even left the door open to technically disabling CP functionality in future S/4 releases, which would push this from compliance risk into outright business disruption.”

Bickley, too, sees compliance issues. “Under the existing 2025 expiration date, companies still using the Compatibility Packs would technically be non-compliant with their software use rights with SAP,” he pointed out. “This extension provides relief for this subset of customers as they work with SAP to migrate away from these solutions.”

One theme is consistent, said Gogia: urgency. “The extension didn’t lower expectations, it clarified them. Enterprises now have a very short path to demonstrate either progress or exposure. The smart ones are turning this into a structured program with timelines, ownership, and budget. The ones that don’t risk being caught flat-footed, not just by SAP, but by their own stakeholders asking why the risk wasn’t addressed when they still had time.”