Exclusive Airbus is undertaking a major overhaul to migrate its sprawling SAP environment to S/4HANA – and potentially to the cloud – as the aerospace giant grapples with the same deadline pressures facing thousands of enterprise customers worldwide.

The company currently runs a patchwork of SAP versions, including legacy SAP R/3 4.6 and ECC 6.0 systems. While some divisions – finance, materials management, and parts of Airbus Helicopters – have already moved to S/4HANA, the bulk of the migration lies ahead.

Standard support for ECC6 ends in 2027, with extended support available until 2030 for a premium. But Catherine Jestin, executive vice president of digital at Airbus, hopes SAP will agree to further extensions.

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"If you talk to some of the CIOs in Europe who implemented ECC6, most of us will not be finished with the migration by 2030," Jestin told The Register. "SAP has agreed to extend support until 2032 if you have a joint roadmap and commitment. But if you don't have a roadmap by 2030, they'll stop support."

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The scale of the challenge is enormous. Gartner data shows 39 percent of SAP's 35,000 ECC customers worldwide had [4]yet to migrate as of Q4 last year , nearly a decade after S/4HANA launched in 2015.

Many customers remain skeptical about migrating, and Jestin understands why.

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"It's massive work," she said. "If you just do a technical migration without transforming your processes and simplifying, there aren't many benefits. You won't get any efficiency or return on investment – you're just buying time to get support."

Airbus is taking a different approach, using the migration as an opportunity to overhaul business processes. The company had heavily customized its SAP installation with extensive ABAP code, which created upgrade difficulties.

[6]Seven years later, Airbus is still trying to kick its Microsoft habit

[7]SAP users still wrestling with business case for S/4HANA

[8]SAP's migration narrative suddenly looks messy as Kingfisher goes off-script

[9]Airbus: We were hours from pausing production in Spain

"We're coming back to SAP standard, which will bring a lot of value because next time we upgrade, it will be much easier," Jestin said. "We already see that with Airbus Helicopters, which started their journey before us."

Airbus is also targeting moving to cloud-based S/4HANA, driven partly by necessity. SAP's newer modules like Integrated Business Planning (IBP) and Business Technology Platform (BTP) are only available in the cloud. But there's a catch: data sovereignty concerns.

"Part of the information we'll migrate is extremely sensitive from a national and European perspective," Jestin explained. "We need a sovereign cloud solution to ensure this information stays under control of European citizens."

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For customers still on legacy systems, the message is clear: commit to migration or lose support. While third-party support providers like Rimini Street remain an option for holdouts, Airbus is moving forward with its transformation – however long it takes. ®

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