Origina expands independent maintenance to SAP customers
Mon, 1st Jun 2026 (Today)
Origina has expanded its independent software maintenance service to include SAP as many customers face a deadline to move from ECC systems.
The offering covers SAP ECC Business Suite and SAP S/4HANA in perpetually licensed environments, including SAP applications, databases, integrations, third-party licensed products and customised estates. It is aimed at organisations that want to keep existing SAP systems running without moving on the vendor's timetable.
The expansion comes as large customers weigh the cost of staying on older systems against the expense and disruption of migration programmes. SAP's end of mainstream maintenance for SAP Business Suite 7 and ECC environments has become a focal point for IT planning, especially for companies that have not yet moved to S/4HANA.
Research commissioned by Origina found that 79% of SAP customers expect the share of their IT budget taken up by vendor-driven upgrades, migrations and licensing changes to rise over the next 24 months. The survey covered more than 2,000 CIOs and senior IT decision-makers in the US and UK, including more than 430 SAP customers.
The same research found that the average SAP customer had paid USD $13.7 million for its most recent vendor-driven change. The figure adds to concerns among technology leaders about software roadmap decisions consuming budgets that could otherwise be used for other IT priorities.
Industry estimates suggest the migration challenge remains unresolved for much of SAP's customer base. Origina cited Gartner data showing that about half of SAP ECC customers, or around 17,000 organisations, are not expected to have upgraded to S/4HANA by the deadline.
For those customers, the decision is becoming increasingly expensive. Standard maintenance charges of 22%, combined with an extra 2% to 9% for extended ECC support through 2030, have increased the cost of delay, while migration projects themselves are often priced in the tens of millions of dollars.
Customer pressure
That pressure is helping drive demand for third-party maintenance providers offering support outside a software vendor's own model. These providers argue they can keep older systems stable and secure while giving customers more time to decide whether and when a migration makes commercial sense.
Origina has built its business around that argument in other software markets, supporting customers across IBM, HCL and VMware environments. The SAP expansion adds another major enterprise software platform at a time when CIOs are under close scrutiny over large transformation spending.
SAP customers using the service will also be able to draw on Origina's security and licence advisory work. That includes support for vulnerabilities in areas that may sit outside a standard vendor patch cycle, as well as advice on contract renewals and software audits.
Rowan O'Donoghue, Chief Innovation Officer and Co-Founder, set out the company's position on the issue. "Enterprises should not have to change working systems on someone else's timetable," he said.
"SAP's deadlines reflect SAP's roadmap and commercial interests, which may not always align with those of their customers. We are giving CIOs and IT leaders a way to decide when modernization and migration actually make sense for their business, and the leverage to negotiate from a position of choice. In the meantime, customers can keep running their stable SAP environments with Origina for as long as they choose."
Budget impact
The budget issue is likely to resonate beyond SAP users because it reflects a broader concern in enterprise IT over supplier control of support cycles and licensing models. CIOs are increasingly expected to justify not only the direct cost of migration programmes but also the operational risk of changing systems that still run core business processes.
In many large organisations, ECC systems continue to support finance, supply chain, procurement and other central operations. Replacing or replatforming them is rarely a simple technical upgrade, particularly where environments have been heavily tailored over many years.
That complexity helps explain why support decisions have moved from routine IT administration to board-level discussion. The combination of licence terms, maintenance fees, migration costs and cyber risk means software support has become a strategic issue rather than a back-office one.
Origina now serves more than 300 large enterprises across the software markets in which it operates. Its latest move places it in a part of the market where concern over cost control and vendor dependence is becoming more pronounced.
O'Donoghue said the company sees demand for an alternative route for SAP customers. "SAP customers now have a credible independent choice, one built around control, transparency and operational resilience.
"And choice creates the competition that delivers value back to them."