On November 27, 2019, SAP published a long anticipated announcement regarding the future of Sybase within SAP. Under the leadership of Irfan Khan, President SAP Platform & Technologies, SAP renewed its commitment to its Sybase customers to not only ensure that the product will be supported in the future, but that it invests into new features and functionalities to guarantee its relevance in a very competitive database system market.
It is important to understand that SAP typically does not announce product strategies well in advance, but since the Sybase customers have asked for a long time what the future holds for Sybase, SAP took on the task to outline exactly that.
In short, SAP is committing to support the Sybase products beyond the infamous 2025 date, new releases will be launched in 2020, a cloud subscription will be added in 2020 for all Sybase products, and much more. Bottom-line, the long-time investments customers made into Sybase will be protected and the new features will even attract new customers.
What is SAP announcing?
SAP is committed to the long-term enhancement, maintenance, and support of SAP® Adaptive Server Enterprise (SAP ASE), SAP IQ software, and SAP Replication Server (sometimes referred to as Sybase products). SAP plans the following:
A new release of SAP ASE (version 16) is scheduled to be available in 2020. Additional releases will be supported beyond the published end-of-maintenance date of 2025.
SAP is investing in new managed cloud services for SAP ASE and SAP IQ as part of the SAP HANA® Cloud data platform.
What is SAP’s commitment to customers of SAP ASE, SAP IQ, and SAP Replication Server?
SAP is committed to supporting all SAP database customers and will ensure customers continue to benefit from our full database portfolio, both on-premise and in the cloud on the new SAP HANA Cloud database platform.
Is support for on-premise SAP ASE ending in 2025?
No. Support is not ending. We are planning a new release (version 16) for SAP ASE in 2020 and have committed to supporting additional releases beyond the published end-of-maintenance date of 2025. Our customers will have the benefit of a long support cycle and the assurance of multiple years of support. SAP announces future product versions, options, and maintenance extensions with significant lead times in consideration of our customers’ changing requirements.
The intention of publishing the dates for the end of mainstream maintenance in the product availability matrix (PAM) is to provide customers with the confidence of long-term support for their product. However, outside of SAP, this has been misinterpreted as being the end of life for the product.
What investments are being made in new managed cloud services for SAP ASE and SAP IQ?
SAP is making additional investments in SAP ASE, SAP IQ, and SAP Replication Server as part of our recently announced SAP HANA Cloud offering. Details and delivery dates will be published soon. SAP HANA Cloud will allow existing customers of SAP ASE and SAP IQ to move their on-premise workloads to the cloud:
SAP HANA Cloud will include a managed extreme-online-transaction-processing (XOLTP) service (based on SAP ASE) and a relational data lake service (based on SAP IQ).
Customers will be able to move existing SAP ASE and SAP IQ landscapes (including SAP Replication Server) into SAP HANA Cloud, preserving compatibility with the current releases.
Customers will benefit from the additional services offered by SAP HANA Cloud – such as data virtualization or advanced analytics capabilities – through one, simple gateway to all their data.
How will the planned SAP ASE and SAP IQ cloud services fit in with SAP HANA Cloud?
These services will be part of SAP HANA Cloud. SAP HANA Cloud is a cloud solution that combines all of SAP’s data and analytics capabilities as one set of interconnected services. SAP HANA Cloud provides simplicity to users by offering a fast and simple interface, and flexibility for administrators to freely optimize the data landscape. Providing SAP ASE, SAP IQ, and SAP Replication Server services in SAP HANA Cloud provides customers with a managed solution, elastic scaling, on-demand deployment, and consumption-based pricing.
When will road maps for cloud offerings be available?
Along with the additional investment, planning is underway to bring SAP ASE and SAP IQ into SAP HANA Cloud. Look for road map feature-sets and release dates to be published in December 2019.
Summary
SAP is committed to the long-term enhancement, maintenance, and support of SAP ASE, SAP IQ, and SAP Replication Server. SAP plans to release new cloud managed services as part of SAP HANA Cloud in late 2020. Customers can choose to maintain their on-premise investment and incrementally utilize the cloud for efficiency and additional services in SAP HANA Cloud. Alternatively, customers will be able to directly move their landscapes to SAP HANA Cloud using these new services.