Timelines

The urgency of any migration plan comes from SAP's published maintenance timeline for Solution Manager. Get the facts from SAP's own pages and SAP Notes rather than from hearsay, because the details matter: what ends when, what continues, and under which conditions.

What SAP states

• Mainstream maintenance for SAP Solution Manager 7.2 is available until the end of 2027. SAP's Solution Manager support page states this directly, and it applies to the Focused Build and Focused Insights add-ons as well.
• SAP Focused Run is different: the same SAP page states that its maintenance conditions are independent of Solution Manager's and that SAP Focused Run will remain in mainstream maintenance beyond 2027.
• Solution Manager 7.2 follows the maintenance approach of SAP Business Suite 7. Customers who choose the optional extended maintenance for SAP Business Suite 7 (until the end of 2030) also get extended maintenance for Solution Manager 7.2 at no extra charge.
• That extended maintenance covers selected functionality only. SAP lists areas including requirements management, project management, process management, the test suite, change control management, IT service management and landscape management, and points to SAP Note 3255311 for the details.
• After those dates, SAP's ALM FAQ says Solution Manager 7.2 remains under customer-specific maintenance, and on-premise customers keep their perpetual license and can continue to use it.
• SAP recommends that all customers transition to SAP Cloud ALM before the end of 2027.

What it means for test assets

Extended maintenance can buy time, but it is conditional on a Business Suite 7 decision and covers selected functionality. For a company like Contoso that converts to SAP S/4HANA and runs the new program in SAP Cloud ALM, the practical question is not "how long can the old Test Suite survive?" but "how long do we need it in parallel?". Two populations matter: the ECC support organization that uses ChaRM and the Test Suite until the old systems are retired, and the S/4HANA program that already works in Cloud ALM.

For Contoso the dates translate into a concrete plan. The ECC support team keeps ChaRM and the Test Suite on Solution Manager 7.2 for ED1, EQ1 and EP1 until the conversion goes live in Q3 and the old landscape is retired after the agreed fallback period. The S/4HANA program already runs testing in SAP Cloud ALM for CMD, CMQ and CMP. The overlap is therefore months, not years, which makes extended maintenance largely irrelevant for test management and puts the effort into choosing which legacy assets protect the transition and which are rebuilt in the new approach. Companies with a longer ECC tail, or several ECC systems converting in waves, face a longer overlap and should weigh the extended maintenance option more carefully.