Moving off SAP PI/PO before 2027: a migration plan that works

SAP PI and PO 7.5 follow the same timeline as the rest of Business Suite 7. Mainstream maintenance ends on 31 December 2027, extended maintenance is available to the end of 2030 at extra cost, and after that there are no patches or security fixes. For a platform that carries orders, invoices, payroll files and EDI with every trading partner, running unsupported is not a real option.

SAP's successor is SAP Integration Suite on BTP. For data that must stay inside your network, the Edge Integration Cell runs integration flows on your own Kubernetes infrastructure while they are designed and managed from the cloud.

Step 1: know what you have

A PI/PO system built over ten or fifteen years usually holds more interfaces than anyone can list from memory. Start with:

• an export of the integration directory and repository objects;
• message volumes per interface for the last twelve months;
• the business owner and the partner for each interface.

Interfaces with no traffic in a year are candidates for retirement, not migration. SAP's migration assessment capability in Integration Suite can classify the rest by complexity, which gives you a first effort estimate.

Step 2: design the target, not a copy

A one-to-one copy of every PI/PO interface wastes the move. Use it to:

• consolidate duplicate interfaces that grew up for different projects;
• replace custom code with standard APIs and prebuilt content where they exist;
• switch polling and batch file transfers to events where the business benefits from near real-time updates;
• set standards for naming, error handling, alerting and monitoring that every new flow follows.

Decide early which flows run in the cloud and which need the Edge Integration Cell for regulatory, latency or legacy-network reasons.

Step 3: migrate in waves

Group interfaces by partner, process and risk, and start with lower-risk flows to build experience. Integration Suite includes migration tooling that can move supported PI/PO patterns automatically; the rest are rebuilt. B2B and EDI flows usually move to Trading Partner Management, which handles partner agreements and message formats more cleanly than custom mappings did.

Step 4: run in parallel, then switch

For each wave, run old and new flows side by side where possible, compare outputs on real messages, and switch partners over in agreed windows. Only decommission PI/PO once message monitoring shows nothing left running through it.

Timing

Working back from the end of 2027, a landscape with a few hundred interfaces needs to start now to finish on mainstream maintenance. Starting later is possible, but plan the extended maintenance cost into the budget rather than discovering it in 2028.