SAP offers faster updates, longer maintenance for S/4HANA in private clouds

SAP is doubling the time between major releases of S/4HANA Cloud private edition from one year to two — at the same time promising to release new feature packs every six months or so to keep up the pace of innovation. It is also extending maintenance to seven years, from five today.

The changes will take effect with the 2023 release of software, which is now generally available.

The good news for SAP is that many of the customers adopting its cloud-based S/4HANA offering are net-new, meaning more market share. The bad news is that many of them are net-new, meaning that the mass of customers still using its legacy ECC system, or running its modern S/4HANA system on-premises, are not migrating as quickly as the company would like to cloud offerings such as Rise with SAP, its subscription package of licensing, hosting, and application management.

Slowing the pace of major releases for the private cloud edition of S/4HANA to once every two years, so that CIOs experience less disruption in keeping their systems up to date, is one of the ways SAP is seeking to make it more tempting.

This change alone would have sent a mixed message after SAP’s CEO Christian Klein’s recent pronouncement that only customers buying the cloud editions of its products through its Rise offering would see major innovations, particularly in the generative AI space. The promise of six-monthly feature packs in the intervals between platform major releases will go some way to reassuring customers that the cloud is the place to be.

“A feature pack is less disruptive than an upgrade, because you’re just adding it right into the current release,” said Eric van Rossum, chief marketing and solutions officer for SAP Cloud ERP.