What Happened to SAP Hybris (now SAP Commerce On-Prem)? Your Guide to SAP Commerce Cloud and the 2026 Deadline

If your enterprise runs on an on-premise version of SAP Commerce, formerly Hybris, you are facing a critical business deadline. Mainstream maintenance for the platform will end on 31 July 2026, rendering your core commerce engine obsolete.

Treating this as a distant technical issue is a mistake. Continuing on an unsupported platform exposes your business to severe security risks, inevitable compatibility failures with payment gateways, and unpredictable maintenance costs. Every day you delay planning your migration, you lose ground to more agile competitors and risk a rushed, disruptive, and costly transition.

The necessary path forward is a strategic migration to SAP Commerce Cloud. This process is an opportunity to shed technical debt, strengthen security, and build a more scalable and innovative commerce foundation. This guide provides a pragmatic roadmap for decision-makers to navigate this transition, turning a mandatory update into a durable competitive advantage.

Here’s what we’ll cover:

• Hybris vs SAP Commerce Cloud
• Cloud Migration ROI
• Risks of staying with Hybris
• How to migrate from SAP Hybris to SAP Commerce Cloud
• How to find the right migration partner
• Frequently asked questions about SAP Hybris

Hybris vs SAP Commerce Cloud: Understanding the Evolution

Hybris was acquired by SAP in 2013 and has fundamentally evolved from a monolithic on-premise product into the agile, cloud-native SAP Commerce Cloud – the sole focus of all future SAP innovation.

Many enterprise businesses built their initial e-commerce success on the Hybris platform. It was a powerful, market-leading solution for its time, known for robust, highly customizable on-premise capabilities that could handle complex product catalogs and business rules. In 2013, SAP acquired Hybris to integrate a market-leading commerce engine into an end-to-end customer experience portfolio. For a time, the name and core architecture remained, but the market was already shifting decisively toward the cloud.

This market shift drove the platform’s most significant transformation. SAP rebranded the solution to SAP Commerce and began a fundamental architectural pivot toward a modern, cloud-native platform. This signaled SAP’s commitment to a cloud-first strategy, meaning all new research and development would be channeled exclusively into the cloud version. The on-premise solution that many businesses still rely on is now a legacy system.

Calculate the Migration’s ROI: The Business Case for Migrating to the Cloud

Migrating from Hybris to SAP Commerce Cloud is a compelling business case built on reduced costs, accelerated innovation, and superior performance. While the deadline forces a decision, the business benefits of the cloud provide the justification.

Reduced Total Cost of Ownership

A primary advantage is the reduction in Total Cost of Ownership (TCO). On-premise systems demand significant and unpredictable capital expenditure (CapEx) for hardware, server maintenance, and manual software upgrades. SAP Commerce Cloud shifts this to a predictable operational expenditure (OpEx) subscription model.

Research from Nucleus Research found that cloud deployments delivered four times the ROI of on-premise applications, largely by eliminating the “hidden” costs of internal IT overhead and infrastructure management. This frees up your internal IT resources to focus on developing new customer features instead of managing servers.

Improved Business Agility

The cloud model also accelerates business agility. On-premise platforms are typically upgraded in large, infrequent projects that can take many months. With SAP Commerce Cloud, new features are delivered automatically in a continuous cycle. This allows your business to respond to market changes much faster. According to McKinsey, the value a business gains from cloud-enabled innovation is more than five times greater than what is possible by simply reducing IT costs.

Guaranteed Scalability and Performance

The cloud eliminates the manual effort of scaling for peak demand. Handling a traffic surge on an on-premise platform requires weeks of planning and costly investment in extra hardware that sits idle most of the year. SAP Commerce Cloud’s architecture automatically expands to meet demand, ensuring a stable customer experience during critical revenue periods.

Fortified Security and Simplified Compliance

Migrating to SAP Commerce Cloud offloads a substantial portion of your security and compliance burden. SAP’s dedicated security teams manage the infrastructure, providing constant monitoring and automated patching. This shift fortifies your defences and simplifies adherence to data protection standards like GDPR, freeing your team to focus on strategic initiatives rather than reactive security management.

Assess the Risks of Inaction

Failing to migrate from your on-premise platform before the 31 July 2026 end-of-maintenance deadline introduces four distinct and severe risks to your revenue, reputation, and operations. After this, your business will face the following consequences.

Risk 1: Competitive Disadvantage

The most significant risk is strategic. While your teams are preoccupied with fixing a legacy system, your competitors on modern cloud platforms will be innovating. They will be launching new features, using AI to personalize customer experiences, and optimizing their operations. Sticking with an on-premise platform is a business decision to stand still while the market moves forward.

Risk 2: Critical Security Vulnerabilities

Once the deadline passes, SAP will no longer release security patches for the on-premise platform. Any new vulnerabilities will remain unpatched, leaving your system and your customers’ sensitive data exposed. Considering the average cost of a data breach reached $4.4 million in 2024, according to a report from IBM, running an unsupported e-commerce platform is an unacceptable financial and reputational risk.

Risk 3: System Incompatibility and Failure

The digital ecosystem is constantly evolving. A new browser update or a mandatory API change from a payment gateway could break critical functionality on an unmaintained platform. Without ongoing updates from SAP, your on-premise system will inevitably fall out of sync with the modern web, leading to broken user experiences, failed transactions, and lost sales.

Risk 4: Unpredictable and Soaring Costs

While some level of support may be available after the deadline under “customer-specific maintenance,” this model is reactive and expensive. It does not include proactive updates for new issues and often comes at a premium cost. You will be paying more for a lower level of service, with no guarantee that critical problems can even be fixed.

How to Migrate from SAP Hybris to SAP Commerce Cloud?

To succeed, a migration must be treated as a strategic business transformation, not just a technical “lift and shift.” This requires a structured, phased approach designed to minimize risk and maximize business value. At NETCONOMY, we follow a methodical approach that ensures the new platform is aligned with your business goals.

Phase 1: Run a Strategic Assessment

The journey starts with strategy, not technology. This initial phase involves a deep-dive analysis of your existing customizations, integrations, and business processes. We conduct workshops with your sales, marketing, and IT leaders to ask critical questions: Which of our 200 customizations are actually still used and driving revenue? What manual processes can be automated in the new platform? The outcome is a robust business case and a clear vision for the future-state architecture.

Phase 2: Design the Solution and Roadmap

With a clear vision, we create a detailed migration roadmap. This is where we decide what to migrate directly, what needs to be rebuilt to take advantage of cloud capabilities, and what legacy customizations can be retired. This provides a valuable opportunity to shed technical debt and simplify your architecture. We use prioritization methods to ensure that the most critical business capabilities, like a streamlined checkout or a new B2B customer portal, are addressed first.

Phase 3: Implement with Agility

We use an agile, iterative approach to the implementation and data migration process. Working in sprints with regular demonstrations allows for continuous feedback from your business teams, ensuring the project remains aligned with your goals. This method minimizes the risk of a “big bang” go-live and provides business continuity throughout the transition.

Phase 4: Drive Continuous Optimization

The project does not end when the new platform goes live. The real value of the cloud lies in its flexibility. After the launch, we leverage analytics and user feedback to continuously monitor, learn, and enhance the platform. This data-driven approach ensures that your investment continues to deliver value and drive business growth long after the migration is complete.

We applied this exact phased approach to migrate Virgin Megastore’s complex, multi-country commerce solution to the cloud with zero downtime. You can learn more about it in our customer story.

Choose Your Migration Partner Wisely

The single most important factor in a successful migration is the expertise of your implementation partner. For a mission-critical enterprise transformation, you need a partner with deep SAP knowledge, a proven track record with large-scale projects, and a strategic, business-first mindset. An in-house team may have product knowledge, but a dedicated partner brings the invaluable experience of having guided multiple complex enterprises through this exact transition.

As a Gold-level SAP partner with over 20 years of experience, we have a deep, institutional knowledge of its complex enterprise ecosystem. Our focus is exclusively on guiding large, complex organizations so we are intimately familiar with the scale and high stakes involved in transforming a multi-million euro commerce operation.

We want to build future-proof digital commerce platforms, not simply migrate websites. Our expertise lies in connecting your front- and back-office operations – from e-commerce and CRM to your core ERP system – into a cohesive whole. We proud ourselves on being a long-term strategic partner, helping you leverage technology not just to keep pace, but to become a market leader.

If you are facing the 2026 deadline, the time to start planning is now. Contact us to begin a strategic assessment of your SAP Commerce landscape.

Frequently Asked Questions about SAP Hybris

Q1: What is SAP Hybris called now?

SAP Hybris was rebranded and has evolved into SAP Commerce Cloud. The on-premise version of SAP Hybris is now a legacy system, and all new development and innovation from SAP is focused exclusively on the cloud platform.

Q2: What is the end-of-life date for on-premise SAP Commerce (Hybris)?

The official end-of-maintenance date for the final on-premise version of SAP Commerce is 31 July 2026. After this date, SAP will no longer provide security patches, updates, or mainstream support for the platform.

Q3: Why is it risky to continue using SAP Hybris on-premise after the deadline?

Continuing to use the on-premise platform after July 2026 exposes your business to significant risks, including critical security vulnerabilities from a lack of patches, system failures due to incompatibility with modern web technologies, unpredictable and high costs for reactive support, and a growing competitive disadvantage as rivals innovate on the cloud.

Q4: What are the main advantages of migrating to SAP Commerce Cloud?

Migrating to SAP Commerce Cloud offers significant business benefits, including a lower Total Cost of Ownership (TCO), faster innovation cycles through automatic updates, guaranteed performance and scalability, and enhanced security managed by SAP’s expert teams.

Q5: Is migrating to SAP Commerce Cloud a simple technical upgrade?

No, a successful migration is a strategic business transformation. It requires a structured approach that starts with a strategic assessment of your business goals and existing processes to ensure the new cloud platform is designed to maximize business value and drive future growth, not just replicate old functionality.