SAP S/4HANA 1709 / 1809 / 1909

Overview

SAP S/4HANA 1709, 1809 and 1909 are the early on-premise releases of SAP's HANA-based next-generation ERP, named by year and quarter under the original release cadence. 1909 in particular became the popular long-term landing release for organisations that adopted S/4HANA early, valued for its stability after the first wave of releases; many production S/4HANA systems in service today still run on one of these three versions.

It became generally available on 15 September 2017. SAP mainstream maintenance ended 31 December 2024 — after which SAP no longer ships corrections, legal changes or new support package stacks for this version. An optional paid extended-maintenance phase ran to 31 December 2025, and that too has now passed. Systems still on this release are now running without standard SAP support, which is a security, compliance and audit exposure that should be closed quickly.

Because these are already SAP S/4HANA, the way forward is a release upgrade rather than a re-platforming: an in-place upgrade to a current release — ideally 2023 or 2025 — carried out with the Software Update Manager, with custom-code and simplification-item checks along the way. The effort is materially smaller than an ECC-to-S/4HANA conversion, but it should not be deferred, because all three releases share a single extended-maintenance cut-off and the upgrade still needs testing and regression cycles.

Organisations that moved to S/4HANA early and parked on 1909 (or 1709/1809) are the key audience. Their releases are now at or past mainstream maintenance, so application owners, Basis teams and the business process owners who will run regression testing should schedule a near-term upgrade to a current release to stay supported and to pick up several years of functional innovation in one step.