October 14, 2019

October 14, 2019 | Larry Goldman | Senior Director, Product Marketing

Unique insights into how SAP Sybase/ASE customers will decide their strategic roadmaps in the years ahead.

At Spinnaker Support, we continue to onboard new customers for third-party Sybase / ASE support (we’ll shorten it to Sybase going forward). On the basis of what we are seeing and (not) hearing about the market, we recently posted on the topic of the future of Sybase/ASE.

At the same time, we decided to go directly to the market to capture what Sybase customers are actually thinking and planning to do in the face of the 2025 End of Mainstream Maintenance (EoMM). We sponsored a third-party research project with Technology Evaluation Centers (TEC) to identify and canvass dedicated Sybase users. For two months this summer, TEC conducted its survey, eventually gathering responses from 97 Sybase users.

We now have the TEC analysis in hand to share with you. The results are fascinating and, at times, unexpected. Below you can view an infographic with select data and download the full white paper.

Answering the Question: What Are Organizations Planning to Do with Sybase?

While SAP will not comment directly, all indicators point to the close of the Sybase era, despite the continued dedication of thousands of Sybase customers. The SAP roadmap calls for HANA as the foundation of all SAP products, and so it is pushing customers for a direct migration from Sybase to SAP HANA.

Yet – as we suspected – many organizations are still weighing their options. These include maintaining their existing system as-is, upgrading their Sybase system to a newer release, or migrating to a different database solution. Other considerations involve who they would want to provide Sybase support going forward. The infographic below represents an overview of what the survey discovered.

TEC Sybase/ASE Survey Results Infographic

Download the Full Research Report

This research is the first in years to benchmark the Sybase market. In exposing the state of the Sybase community, this survey provides compelling details regarding the Sybase IT roadmap of peer organizations. Our hope is that this will inform public and private discussions concerning Sybase-related business strategies.

Key survey findings include:

  1. Most Sybase/ASE users are happy with their systems and would prefer to keep them.
  2. Almost a third of companies planning to migrate to another system will do so within a year, while half are committed to migrating within the next five years.
  3. Oracle Database is a more popular choice than SAP HANA among those planning to migrate.
  4. Postgres is another popular choice, particularly among retailers.
  5. Users’ support type also influences their planning. Most companies who’ve replaced SAP support with third-party support plan to maintain their Sybase/ASE installations for as long as possible.

Technology Evaluation Centers Inc., has expressly granted Spinnaker Support the right to use these reports. The use of these reports is restricted for internal and informational purposes. Any other use is strictly prohibited. © Technology Evaluation Centers Inc.