The deadline most programmes are not tracking
Most SAP customers tracking the 31 December 2027 end-of-mainstream-maintenance deadline are focused on their ECC-to-S/4HANA migration. That is the right primary focus. But there is a second 2027 deadline that affects every SAP customer, regardless of where they are on their S/4HANA journey: the end of mainstream maintenance for SAP Process Integration and SAP Process Orchestration — SAP PI/PO 7.5.
SAP PI/PO is the integration middleware that connects SAP to the world. It routes messages between SAP ECC or S/4HANA and third-party systems — EDI partners, logistics platforms, banking interfaces, HR systems, warehouse management tools, and hundreds of bespoke point-to-point connections accumulated over years of operation. When it works, nobody notices. When it fails, purchase orders stop flowing, invoices stall, and warehouse movements go unconfirmed.
After 31 December 2027, SAP will no longer provide standard security patches, vulnerability fixes, or new corrections for SAP PI/PO under mainstream maintenance. Extended maintenance is available at additional cost through the end of 2030, but that is a deferral, not a solution.
What SAP PI/PO actually does in most organisations
Message routing and protocol conversion. PI/PO translates between communication protocols — IDoc, RFC, SOAP, REST, HTTP, SFTP, JDBC, JMS — and routes messages between sender and receiver systems.
Message mapping. PI/PO applies field-level mappings to transform the structure of a message from the sender’s format to the receiver’s format. An IDoc from SAP becomes an EDIFACT message for an EDI partner, or an XML payload for a banking portal.
Integration logic. Over years of operation, many PI/PO landscapes accumulate routing conditions, content-based routing rules, exception handling logic, and retry behaviour that effectively encodes business rules. This logic is often undocumented.
Monitoring and alerting. PI/PO provides a monitoring cockpit where integration teams track message status, identify failures, and manage reprocessing — in many organisations, the daily operational tool for the integration team.
The SAP Integration Suite on BTP provides all of these capabilities — and significantly more — through its Cloud Integration component, API Management, Event Mesh, and Integration Advisor.
What the migration actually involves
SAP provides a Migration Assessment tool — a guided analysis that connects to your PI/PO system, extracts the interface inventory, and classifies each interface by migration complexity: semi-automated migration (standard adapter types, straightforward mappings), manual migration (complex custom mapping logic), and redesign candidates (architecturally obsolete integration patterns).
A structured migration follows five phases: Discover (run the assessment, establish interface inventory, produce wave plan — typically 7–10 days); Prepare (set up Integration Suite tenant on BTP, establish connectivity via SAP Cloud Connector, define naming conventions); Explore and Realize (migrate interfaces wave by wave, semi-automated via tooling, manual via iFlow development); Test (semi-automated regression testing using historical payloads, end-to-end process validation); Deploy and Hypercare (cutover, parallel operation monitoring, knowledge transfer).
In a typical PI/PO landscape, the majority of interfaces by count fall into the semi-automated category. But the minority — complex interfaces, undocumented business logic, customised adapters — carries the highest business risk and the longest migration effort.
Clean Core alignment: the strategic value beyond compliance
The PI/PO-to-Integration Suite migration aligns directly with SAP’s Clean Core strategy, which is central to the value of S/4HANA in the agentic AI era. SAP’s Clean Core principle requires that custom logic be decoupled from the S/4HANA application core — stored in BTP extensions rather than embedded in ABAP modifications.
There is also a connectivity benefit. SAP Integration Suite connects natively to the SAP BTP ecosystem — Joule, the Generative AI Hub, SAP AI Core, Event Mesh, and SAP Business Network. An organisation running its integration on SAP Integration Suite can expose SAP business events to agentic AI workflows, trigger SAP transactions from AI agents, and receive structured outputs from AI processes back into SAP business flows. An organisation still running PI/PO in 2028 will be architecturally disconnected from the innovation layer.
Sequencing alongside the S/4HANA programme
Do not couple the programmes. The PI/PO migration is an independent programme with its own scope, timeline, and risk profile. Coupling it to the S/4HANA cutover introduces unnecessary risk on both sides.
Migrate Integration Suite connectivity to S/4HANA, not ECC. If the S/4HANA go-live is within 12–18 months, design the Integration Suite iFlows for S/4HANA connectivity from the start — not ECC. Rebuilding iFlows twice is waste that proper sequencing eliminates.
Prioritise inbound payment and banking interfaces early. Bank statement processing, payment file transmission, and treasury interfaces carry direct financial risk if they fail. Migrate these in an early wave with extensive testing and an extended parallel run period.
Use the landscape inventory as a decommissioning exercise. In most mature PI/PO landscapes, 20–35% of configured interfaces are no longer active. The assessment phase is the right time to decommission these rather than carry them forward.
To discuss how this applies to your programme, contact IOTEK.
Sources & References
- LeverX — SAP PI/PO to Integration Suite Migration — leverx.com/newsroom/sap-pi-po-migration-to-integration-suite
- S5 Consulting — SAP PI/PO Support Ends December 2027 — s5consulting.no/sap-pi-po-support-ends-in-december-2027
SAP, S/4HANA, RISE with SAP, GROW with SAP, Joule, and SAP Business Technology Platform are trademarks of SAP SE. IOTEK CONSULTING LLC is an independent consultancy and is not affiliated with, endorsed by, or a certified partner of SAP SE unless stated in a current written partner agreement. Content is based on publicly available SAP documentation, SAP Community resources, and IOTEK’s independent practitioner experience.