About mainstream maintenance for SAP MDG 8.0 and 9.0 and SAP MDG on SAP S/4HANA

Recently, I have received several questions about SAP’s standard maintenance terms for SAP MDG that are maintained in the Product Availability Matrix (PAM). In particular, the questions were about the fact that today the standard maintenance for SAP MDG 8.0 and 9.0 in PAM s set to December 2020.

The specified dates in PAM are the minimal guaranteed maintenance range. For the SAP MDG versions which run on top of ERP 6.0, this is a little tricky, so let me elaborate on that a bit:

SAP ships MDG versions on top of ERP 6.0 Enhancement Packages (EhPs) and whenever there is a new EhP for ERP 6.0, SAP includes the latest version of MDG in that shipment.

Examples:

• SAP MDG 8.0 can be installed on top of SAP EhP 7 for SAP ERP 6.0
• SAP MDG 8.0 was included in SAP EhP 8 for SAP ERP 6.0
• SAP MDG 9.0 can be installed on top of SAP EhP 8 for SAP ERP 6.0
• …

Because of this, there is a full matrix of dependencies of what needs to be maintained how. In order to mitigate this complexity, the following principles are applied:

• For each version of SAP MDG that is included in an EhP for SAP ERP 6.0, the maintenance is guaranteed as long as for the enhancement package itself
• For each EhP for SAP ERP 6.0 there will be at least one version of SAP MDG that will be maintained as long as the enhancement package itself *

*) It has not been decided yet which version of MDG on top of EhP8 is going to be the one that will be set for mainstream maintenance until 2025, but there will be at least one version. And please note that in PAM this is always maintained very conservatively: as pointed out before it states the minimum period (which may be prolonged, but never shortened).

This means for example:

SAP MDG 8.0 will be maintained until at least 2025 in the version that is included in EhP8. Accordingly, if companies run MDG 8.0 on EhP7, based on today’s guaranteed maintenance, they might have to upgrade to EhP8 and can continue to run MDG 8.0 on that EhP level.

For the version of MDG shipping with SAP S/4HANA this is much easier, as SAP MDG on SAP S/4HANA (as you can tell from the name) is part of S/4HANA. Accordingly, there is no separate PAM entry for SAP MDG on SAP S/4HANA: the relevant PAM entry is for the SAP S/4HANA version.

Hope this clarifies the maintenance strategy.

Best,

Markus