The SAP 2027 conversation is usually framed as an IT decision: convert, re-implement or wait. That framing misses the part that actually constrains you.
Every SAP customer in Belgium is working against the same date, which means every SAP customer in Belgium is hiring from the same pool in the same eighteen months. The technology is available. The people are not.
The dates, precisely
There are three of them and they get conflated constantly.
- End of 2027: mainstream maintenance ends for SAP Business Suite 7 core applications.
- 2028 to end of 2030: optional extended maintenance is available, at a premium of two percentage points on the maintenance basis.
- End of 2040: SAP's innovation commitment for S/4HANA, meaning at least one S/4HANA release stays in maintenance until then.
One earlier date is already behind us and catches people out: mainstream maintenance for SAP ERP 6.0 without an enhancement package, and with enhancement packages 1 to 5, ended on 31 December 2025. If you are on an older EHP, you are already outside mainstream maintenance (source: SAP Support).
Extended maintenance is a surcharge, not a reprieve
Three extra years sounds like breathing room. It is priced like what it is.
Extended maintenance costs two percentage points more on the maintenance basis, and it does not buy innovation. You are paying more to stand still on a platform your vendor has already moved past, while the conversion work still has to happen before the end of 2030.
The honest version: extended maintenance is useful if your conversion is genuinely underway and will overrun. It is expensive if you are using it to postpone a decision you have not made.
Why a migration deadline becomes a hiring deadline
Because a conversion is not one skill set, it is four, and they are needed in sequence.
First you need people who can assess the estate: custom code, interfaces, data quality, and which of your modifications are still load-bearing. Then you need functional consultants who know both the legacy configuration and the S/4HANA target. Then technical people for the conversion itself. Then, after go-live, people who can run the thing.
Companies routinely budget for the middle two and forget the first and the last. The assessment gets skipped, which makes the conversion longer, and the run phase gets discovered three weeks before go-live.
The profiles that get scarce first
Not the ABAP developers, at least not first.
The first squeeze is on functional consultants who have genuinely done a conversion, as opposed to having worked on S/4HANA greenfield. Those two experiences are different and the market does not price them the same. Next come integration and data migration specialists, then authorisations and security, which is the single most commonly underestimated workstream in a conversion.
ABAP capacity does get tight, but it is the most substitutable of the four, and it is the one where nearshore and remote delivery genuinely work.
What happens to your ECC specialists afterwards
This is the question nobody puts in the business case, and it is a retention risk.
An internal ECC specialist watching a conversion programme staffed entirely by external consultants draws an obvious conclusion about their own future. They leave during the project, taking the institutional knowledge of why a modification exists, which is precisely the knowledge the conversion needs.
The companies that handle this well put their own people on the conversion team and buy in capacity around them, rather than the reverse. It is slower on paper and faster in practice.
Permanent, freelance or consulting
The staffing model should follow the phase, not the org chart.
Assessment and conversion are finite, deep-expertise work, which is why they suit freelance and consulting capacity. The run phase is permanent work and should be hired as such, early enough that the people are in place before go-live rather than after it.
The mistake we see most often is hiring permanently for the project phase, then having nothing for those people to do in 2029, or the mirror image: running the whole thing on contractors and discovering at go-live that nobody who understands the system is on the payroll.
For the technical and business case for moving, we covered that separately: why Belgian companies need to move now on SAP ECC end of maintenance.
In short
Mainstream maintenance for Business Suite 7 core applications ends at the end of 2027. Extended maintenance runs to the end of 2030 at two percentage points more, and it buys time rather than capability.
The scarce resource is not licences or hardware. It is conversion-experienced functional consultants, integration specialists and authorisations people, and every Belgian SAP customer needs them in the same window.
Decide your staffing model before you finalise your migration plan, because the plan that assumes you can hire a conversion team in the second half of 2027 is not a plan. If you want that mapped against what is actually available in the Belgian market, that is what our consulting team does.
