Worried about the End of Maintenance of your SAP BPC application?

First of all, to fully comprehend what SAP’s ‘End Of Maintenance’ dates really mean, we need to understand SAP’s Maintenance Strategy, which defines the extent and conditions of maintenance for SAP software releases.

There are three different maintenance phases defined in SAP’s Maintenance Strategy:

1. Mainstream maintenance
2. Extended maintenance
3. Customer-specific maintenance

Mainstream maintenance: Is the first maintenance phase for any SAP release, starting from the Release To Customer date (RTC) until the End Of Maintenance date (EOM). During the mainstream maintenance phase, companies receive support according to their support agreement with SAP.

The date for SAP BPC 10.1 version for Microsoft has been recently updated.

Beyond the end of mainstream maintenance

One of the many uncertainties that companies deal with when the end of mainstream maintenance is coming is ‘what happens now?’. Essentially, organizations have the following options:

• Migrating: Moving to a newer BPC version before reaching the end of the mainstream maintenance is the general advice given by SAP. The delivery of new releases of the licensed software, as well as upgrade tools, are covered by the SAP support contract.

• Extended maintenance: In general, SAP used to offer extended maintenance for their different BPC versions. However, according to a statement in their website, at present, SAP does not offer extended maintenance for any release.

• Customer-specific maintenance: When a company does not go for the extended maintenance (or if it is not offered to them), or the extended maintenance contract expires, then, SAP automatically places them in a customer-specific maintenance phase. During this phase, the following restrictions apply to the scope of SAP:

  • Legal changes.

  • Support Packages.

  • No guarantee for technological updates.

  • The solution of customer-specific issues, which means that only the problems that are already recognized by SAP are covered in the yearly maintenance fee.

  • The service level agreements for initial response times and corrective measures are no longer delivered.

  • Remote support for support during the evaluation of the latest Enhancement Package is no longer provided for Enhancement Packages that are based on releases in customer-specific maintenance.

SAP EPM Future Roadmap

Let's have a look at SAP’s EPM roadmap:

SAP EPM Product Strategy

We can observe how SAP has divided its strategy into two parts: planning and consolidation.

In terms of planning, SAP Analytics Cloud is SAP’s core strategic solution moving forward. Whereas BPC Optimized is excellent for real-time planning on S/4HANA on-premise.

Group Reporting is SAP strategic consolidation solution moving forward for customers implementing S/4HANA either on the cloud or on-premise.

Webinar SAP EPM

Do you want to know more about Support & Life Cycle Management of your SAP EPM application? Please watch our webinar.

Summary

In our opinion, the new end of maintenance date for SAP BPC MS makes it less urgent to migrate or update to a newer version. However, as it will need to happen in the near future, we advise you to take action if you're still on this version.You don't have to change your complete roadmap, but take a step-by-step approach. For example, by migrating your planning processes to SAC.

Do you want to know more?

If you want to learn more about the transition options and Swap’s offerings to efficiently support SAP EPM and the upgrade, do not hesitate to contact us.

Text: Alejandro Loke