In 2020 Microsoft will end support for Windows 7 and has already ended support for Windows XP and Server 2003. Many corporations have started work to migrate their work environments to Windows 10. As part of this effort, they are finding it is difficult to migrate many legacy applications required for business needs. This legacy software can vary from being too expensive to replace and/or deemed mission critical for the business. While some of the software may actually function on Windows 10 or Server 2016 systems, there is not a decent and proven method to move the software off from previous Windows environments.
An example of legacy software that cannot move was a customer that had a legacy version of SAP 4.7 requiringMicrosoft SQL Server 2000 with patches, which cannot be installed on Windows Server 2016. Additionally, SAP 4.7 uses a Windows MMC (Microsoft management console) plugin to control the server and this plugin is also not supported with the latest version of MMC available on Windows Server 2016. In order to retire Windows Server 2003, the customer would have no choice but to upgrade the SAP software to the latest version at a very high licensing cost; unless another solution could be found.
