A Survey That Separates Migration From Modernization
When SEIDOR surveyed 360 CIOs at companies with more than 100 million euros in revenue across nine countries in Europe and the Americas, it set out to measure something more specific than AI enthusiasm. The SAP ERP Modernization 2026 report, presented at the AUSAPE Forum in Barcelona in June, asked whether companies running SAP are actually transforming their business processes or simply keeping the lights on through a mandated technical migration. The answer, delivered through a three-level framework of migration, simplification, and reinvention, is that nearly everyone is doing the first and almost nobody is doing the third.
Ninety four percent of SAP customers surveyed plan to modernize their ERP in the coming years, a number that on its face looks like near-universal appetite for change. SEIDOR's framework complicates that reading immediately: the same 94 percent describes the share operating at the migration or technical evolution level, the bare minimum required to stay supported. Only 23 percent incorporate what SEIDOR calls effective simplification, and just 15 percent reach the reinvention tier, where processes are redesigned around data and AI rather than carried over from the old system.
The Math Behind "94 Percent"
The gap between 94 percent planning to modernize and 15 percent planning to actually reinvent is the real finding here, and it should change how CIOs read their own project charters. A migration project that replatforms SAP ECC onto S/4HANA without touching underlying processes counts as modernization in nearly every vendor's marketing material and in most internal project trackers. SEIDOR's data suggests that counting it that way obscures a much smaller, much harder population of companies willing to use the migration as an opportunity to redesign how the business actually runs.
Javier Navarro, SEIDOR's Global SAP Leader, warns that the real danger is completing a technical migration while leaving the underlying operating model unchanged, which simply locks in the same inefficiencies on newer, more expensive infrastructure. Forty six percent of respondents cite analytics, data, and AI among their reasons for evolving the ERP, yet 72 percent still describe their view of AI as mainly an automation layer bolted onto existing processes rather than a reason to rethink those processes in the first place.
Why the Deadline Is Doing the Deciding
SAP's own support calendar is the force actually driving most of this activity. Separate reporting on ERP trends has confirmed that SAP ends mainstream support for its older Business Suite systems at the end of 2027, and that an estimated 60 to 70 percent of SAP's installed base has not yet moved to the cloud. With migrations typically taking 18 to 36 months, companies that have not already started are running out of runway to make a considered, strategic choice rather than a forced one.
That timeline explains SEIDOR's finding of two distinct decision windows. The 2026 to 2028 window will be dominated by migration activity driven purely by the maintenance deadline, with limited room for the kind of process redesign that defines reinvention. The more ambitious work, advanced simplification and reinvention tied to AI, is being pushed into a 2028 to 2032 window, after deadline pressure eases. For CIOs under the gun right now, that amounts to deferring transformation rather than abandoning it, provided the migration itself does not foreclose the later option.
The Custom Code Problem
Seventy one percent of respondents say custom developments and accumulated technical debt make evolving their SAP environment moderately or highly difficult. This is the practical reason migration so often crowds out reinvention: years of bespoke code built to fit idiosyncratic processes become the exact liability that makes those processes expensive to redesign later. A clean migration onto new infrastructure does nothing to resolve that debt if the same customizations get carried over wholesale, the default path for any project under deadline pressure.
The technical debt problem is also a governance problem, not just an engineering one. Every custom object, workflow, and integration represents a decision someone made years ago that nobody has revisited, and SEIDOR's data implies most companies are simply porting those decisions forward rather than revisiting them now. Breaking that pattern requires deliberately treating the migration as a checkpoint for process ownership, not just a technical cutover, the discipline that the 15 percent of reinvention-level companies appear to have adopted.
What CIOs Are Willing to Trade
Nine in ten respondents said they would accept more standardized processes in exchange for a system that evolves more easily, a more significant admission than it first appears. Standardization has historically been the concession IT makes grudgingly, after business units fight to preserve the customizations that supposedly give them competitive differentiation. A near-unanimous willingness to trade that differentiation for evolvability suggests CIOs have internalized the cost of technical debt faster than their organizations have changed how they approve new customizations.
Whether that stated willingness survives contact with actual project governance is the open question. Surveys capture intent at a point in time, not the political reality of a business unit leader insisting their process is the exception. The CIOs who turn this stated appetite for standardization into enforced policy, rather than another aspiration that quietly erodes once the migration starts, are the ones most likely to land in SEIDOR's reinvention tier rather than its much larger migration tier.
The Call for Your Roadmap
For any CIO currently scoping an SAP migration, SEIDOR's framework offers a useful diagnostic question to ask before the project kicks off: is this migration, simplification, or reinvention, and does the current plan and budget actually support the tier being claimed internally. Most projects marketed as transformation inside the business are, by SEIDOR's own numbers, migration projects wearing transformation language. Naming that gap honestly at the outset is cheaper than discovering it after the system has gone live and the old processes have simply moved house.
The deadline-driven window through 2028 will not wait for organizations to resolve this ambiguity. Companies that use the forced migration to also enforce process standardization and retire unnecessary custom code have a real shot at reaching reinvention within this cycle rather than deferring it to the next one. Companies that treat the SAP deadline purely as a technical problem to survive will likely find themselves, three years from now, running a newer system that still cannot deliver the AI-driven value their board was promised.
