Insights
Every utility in Great Britain, Northern Ireland and Ireland running SAP IS U now faces a forced choice: move to S/4HANA Utilities, pay to stand still, or leave SAP for a platform like Kraken. Here are the real dates, what 2030 actually means, and how to make the decision like an owner rather than a licensee.
By Christopher Fagan, PEF Consulting Partners. 2 September 2026, updated 22 October 2026.
IS U runs on SAP ECC, part of what SAP calls Business Suite 7, so it follows the ECC support timetable.
S/4HANA itself has a release in maintenance until at least 2040. The extension options sound like breathing room. For a utility they are not, because a billing migration takes years to do safely, and the queue for skilled people will only get longer as 2030 approaches. The decision is effectively now, even if the cutover is not.
No. No regulator in Great Britain, Northern Ireland or Ireland requires a SaaS platform. What 2030 forces is a move off ECC, and staying with SAP on S/4HANA Utilities, on premise or hosted, meets that just as well as moving to a SaaS billing platform. SaaS is an operating model decision, with real benefits and real migration risk, and it should be judged on those terms rather than treated as compliance.
In Ireland the deadline reaches beyond your own estate. ESB Networks runs the central retail market system on IS U, and its Retail Market System Development Plan 2026 to 2030 confirms that IS U drops out of extended support in 2030. It is moving to S/4HANA Utilities, with the work due to finish by the end of 2027 and the impact on suppliers to be set out during 2027. Every supplier connects to that system, so plan for interface and testing work whatever platform you run, and if you are on IS U yourself, expect your own move and the market’s to overlap.
That is one of several changes landing before 2030. We have set out what energy suppliers have to change before 2030, across Great Britain and Ireland, in a separate guide, and our Ireland page sets out how we support suppliers there.
The first is to follow SAP to S/4HANA Utilities. It is the path of least procurement resistance, keeps your SAP skills relevant, and suits utilities whose processes genuinely fit the SAP model. It is also a full reimplementation in all but name, not an upgrade, and it should be costed and governed as one.
The second is to pay for extended maintenance and defer. This is sometimes rational as a bridge, but be clear about what it buys: time, at a rising price, with no reduction in the eventual work. Deferral without a decision is the most expensive option on the list, because you pay twice, once for the extension and once for the migration you did not start. Third party support is a version of the same bet: it can keep the system running, but it does nothing to shrink the migration you still face.
The third is to leave SAP altogether for a modern utility platform, and in practice the conversation increasingly means Kraken, the platform built by Octopus and now licensed by suppliers and networks including EDF and National Grid in the US. The attraction is real: a platform designed around the customer rather than the meter point, and a licence model rather than a build. The risk is equally real: you are trading a known estate for a migration, and migrations are where utilities get hurt.
Having run large SAP and Microsoft estates and led the first ever migration of a water utility onto Kraken, my honest advice is that the technology question is the third most important one. Decide on these instead.
First, your data. If your customer, meter and billing data would not survive a move cleanly, that work is needed under every option, so start it now and let it inform the choice rather than follow it.
Second, your operating model. S/4HANA largely preserves how you work today. Kraken changes it, deliberately. If you want the operating cost profile that platforms like Kraken make possible, you must actually want the ways of working that come with them, because a new platform run like the old one delivers the worst of both.
Third, your delivery capacity. Whichever path you choose, the vendor and the integrator will bring their plan and their optimism. The utilities that come through these programmes well are the ones with senior, independent capability on their own side of the table, testing the plan, owning the data, and holding the cutover honest.
Not “S/4HANA or Kraken”, but “what do we want our cost to serve and our customer operation to look like in 2030, and which path gets us there with a migration we can actually survive”. Answer that, and the platform choice mostly makes itself. IS U runs on SAP ECC, so the SAP ECC end of life timetable applies to you too, and if S/4HANA is on the table, see how we approach SAP utilities migration and assurance.
Mainstream maintenance ends at the end of 2027. Paid extended maintenance runs to the end of 2030, after which SAP provides only customer specific maintenance, with no new patches or legal changes.
Yes, by moving to S/4HANA Utilities, which SAP supports until at least 2040. There is also a transition option to the end of 2033, but only for very large estates that move ECC into SAP’s own cloud before the end of 2030.
No. What is required is leaving ECC before support runs out. S/4HANA Utilities and SaaS platforms such as Kraken both get you there; the choice turns on operating model, cost to serve and migration risk.
Yes, to any company running IS U, ESB Networks included. Its central retail market system is moving to S/4HANA Utilities, due to finish by the end of 2027.
PEF advises utilities from the client side of platform decisions and migrations, with delivery experience across SAP estates and the Kraken platform. A short, confidential conversation will sharpen your options before any vendor shapes them for you.