The deadline is real: SAP ends mainstream maintenance for ECC at the end of 2027, extended maintenance runs to 2030 (+2% maintenance fee), and Gartner estimates 70% of customers haven't migrated. What nobody publishes is who is actually doing something about it. Job postings do: an open req to "support the transition from the legacy SAP ECC platform" is a funded migration, not a roadmap slide.
We read 4.7 million currently-active postings across 761,828 companies and extracted SAP signals with direction — using, adopting, evaluating, replacing. The result is a live census of the migration: who's moving, who's done, and who is sitting on a dying platform with no visible exit plan. Three findings.
Eighteen months to the deadline — and there is no panic in the hiring curve
If the 2027 deadline were driving behavior, you'd expect migration hiring to climb month over month. It doesn't. S/4HANA adoption postings peaked in January 2026 at 38.5 per 100K postings and have drifted down since — June sits at 29. Explicit ECC-replacement postings show the same plateau.
The company-level census explains why. Of the 1,436 companies still carrying ECC, only 175 — about one in eight — are hiring their way out right now. 280 show no S/4HANA signal of any kind. The most likely reading: the market has quietly re-anchored on extended maintenance to 2030, and the companies that were going to move early have already moved — 4,026 companies in our data run S/4HANA with no ECC left and no migration hiring. The crunch hasn't been cancelled. It's been deferred to a window where everyone needs the same integrators at once.
The migration is a factory story, and it speaks German
Strip out the consultancies and the migrating cohort is overwhelmingly industrial: pharma, automotive, chemicals, machinery, food production, utilities. And its center of gravity is unambiguous — Germany alone has 171 companies actively hiring on SAP migrations, half again as many as the United States (113).
The companies that aren't moving look different in one specific way: size. Both cohorts span the full range, but the no-signal group bulges in the 1,000–4,999 employee band — 36% of laggards vs 27% of migrators. That's the profile with a real ECC estate but no permanent transformation office — exactly the customer extended maintenance was priced for, and exactly who will be bidding for integrator capacity last.
| Signal | Companies |
|---|---|
| Replacing ECC | PepsiCo · Safran · Natura · The World Bank Group · Takeda · Richemont · Bombardier · Jumbo Supermarkten · Wawa · Airbus Defence and Space · FrieslandCampina · Universal Orlando Resort · Smurfit Kappa |
| Staffing S/4HANA programs | PepsiCo · ABB · RTX · Honeywell · General Motors · EDF · Deutsche Telekom · BMW Group · Continental · Thales · Siemens Energy · Chevron · Estée Lauder · Kuehne+Nagel · Mondelēz |
The migration drags half a stack with it — and Microsoft is catching most of it
An ERP replatform never travels alone. Among companies adopting S/4HANA, Azure appears in 286 stacks against AWS's 250 and GCP's 177 — one of the few enterprise segments where Microsoft clearly leads the cloud race. Databricks (131) beats Snowflake (91) as the analytical layer moving in alongside.
Two more signals worth a vendor's attention: ABAP is not dying — 212 migrating companies carry it, because brownfield conversions need ABAP hands for years; and RISE with SAP is nearly invisible in hiring terms (13 co-signals), which says the migration is being staffed as an engineering program, not bought as a subscription.
| Technology | Adopting | Evaluating | Using |
|---|---|---|---|
| SAP S/4HANA | 541 | 129 | 5,392 |
| SAP BTP | 70 | 46 | 1,271 |
| SAP SuccessFactors | 44 | 58 | 2,539 |
| SAP Fiori | 40 | 21 | 1,463 |
| SAP Analytics Cloud | 28 | 25 | 1,092 |
| SAP S/4HANA Cloud | 23 | 6 | 254 |
| SAP EWM | 22 | 13 | 837 |
| SAP HANA | 17 | 26 | 1,472 |
| SAP Integration Suite | 16 | 5 | 479 |
| SAP Ariba | 16 | 17 | 803 |
| SAP Datasphere | 16 | 11 | 243 |
| SAP IBP | 15 | 8 | 511 |
| RISE with SAP | 7 | 5 | 55 |
| ABAP | 5 | 20 | 2,177 |
Take the migration list with you
The free CSV has the 50 largest companies actively hiring on a SAP migration — identity, firmographics, which SAP technologies each is adopting, whether it's explicitly replacing ECC, plus hiring context. The full slice (582 migrating companies + the 280-company no-signal cohort, refreshed quarterly) is a product we license — and we'll run a custom pull against your account list at no cost.
How this was measured
Echoloc continuously indexes public job postings; at analysis time the index held 15,207,852 postings, 4,747,583 of them active, across 761,828 companies. An LLM pipeline extracts every technology a posting mentions together with its context — using, adopting, evaluating, replacing. Adoption/replacement signals aggregate from active postings only; using counts draw on the full posting history.
- Active migrator = a company with at least one active posting adopting SAP S/4HANA (or S/4HANA Cloud) or explicitly replacing SAP ECC. No-signal cohort = SAP ECC in the current stack and no S/4HANA signal of any type. Absence of signal is absence of visible motion, not proof a company isn't migrating without public hiring.
- Excluded from company counts: consulting, IT-services, staffing and outsourcing industries (10 categories) plus named professional-services firms — their postings describe client work. They appear only in the integrator sidebar, clearly labeled.
- Direction labels verified against raw text. Postings describing a migration to S/4HANA occasionally carry an inverted "replacing S/4HANA" label; we spot-checked these and excluded that stat entirely. In sampled ECC-replacement postings, 99.7% co-occur with explicit migration language.
- Momentum series uses shares of postings per month; months before continuous indexing (Jan 2026) are survivorship-biased toward long-lived roles.
- Deadline facts: SAP mainstream maintenance for Business Suite 7 ends end of 2027; extended maintenance to 2030 (+2% maintenance fee); a RISE-linked option exists beyond 2030 for select large RISE customers. Gartner's ~70%-unmigrated estimate is as reported in trade press.
Questions, or a number you'd like re-cut? hello@echoloc.ai.