IBM has refreshed its support notice covering the dual-licence arrangement that lets customers run Maximo Asset Management 7.6.1.x and Maximo Application Suite side by side during a migration. The update, published on the IBM support site on 1 June 2026, confirms the same hard date that has been signalled for some time: MAS dual support for EAM 7.6.1.x ends on 30 April 2027. The detail that matters is what the date actually does to perpetual customers versus subscription customers, because the consequences are not the same.
What The Notice Confirms
The mechanism behind dual support is straightforward. When an EAM customer upgrades or trades up their existing Asset Management licence to a MAS licence, they may use EAM and MAS in any deployment combination, up to the total number of MAS entitlements purchased, until dual support for EAM 7.6.1.x is withdrawn. Once the customer has completed their technical migration to Maximo Manage, they are required to discontinue their use of EAM.
The new notice fixes the withdrawal date:
- Effective 30 April 2027, dual support under the MAS licence for EAM 7.6.1.x is no longer available.
- Customers must complete migrations to MAS by 30 April 2027 if they want to remain on a supported footing for both platforms in parallel.
That sentence reads like a single deadline. In practice, it has two distinct meanings depending on how the MAS licence was acquired.
Perpetual Trade-Up
For customers on a perpetual MAS licence acquired through the EAM trade-up route, the 30 April 2027 date is a compliance line. After it, EAM usage rights expire. Continued use of EAM 7.6.1.x in production would put the organisation out of licence compliance, regardless of whether the system is technically running.
That is materially different from a normal end-of-support transition. Running an unsupported system carries operational risk; running an out-of-compliance system carries audit risk on top of it. Internal software asset management functions and any external IBM audit will treat the two very differently.
Subscription Upgrade
For customers on a MAS subscription, the picture is gentler on the licence side. Subscription terms continue to permit use of the components covered by the contract after 30 April 2027, so customers do not slip into non-compliance simply because the date has passed. What they lose is the support entitlement for EAM 7.6.1.x. The platform keeps running, but if it breaks, IBM will not fix it.
The technical exposure is real. EAM 7.6.1.x sits on classic Maximo’s WebSphere stack, and unpatched defects, security advisories, and integration breakages all stop being IBM’s problem at that point. Subscription customers should not read “still in compliance” as “no need to plan”, because the operational risk after April 2027 is a step change.
How This Sits Alongside Existing 7.6.1.x Deadlines
The dual support notice does not exist in isolation. It overlaps with the existing IBM Maximo 7.6.1 lifecycle that asset management teams already track:
- Standard support for Maximo 7.6.1 ended on 30 September 2025.
- Extended Support is available, for purchase, through 30 September 2026.
- Sustained Support, with reduced coverage, is available through 2030.
For an organisation running Maximo 7.6.1.x without any MAS entitlement, those dates are the relevant calendar. For an organisation that has already purchased a MAS licence and is running both platforms during a migration, the dual support deadline of 30 April 2027 is the one that ends the side-by-side arrangement, regardless of which 7.6.1 support tier they are paying for separately.
A useful way to read this: the 7.6.1 lifecycle dates govern the source platform on its own, while the MAS dual support date governs the migration window during which IBM treats the two platforms as a single licensed estate.
What This Means For Migration Sequencing
The deadline reshapes migration planning in three concrete ways.
Cutover Has To Be A Real Date
Many EAM-to-MAS programmes have run with a soft cutover, where Maximo 7.6.1.x stays online for an extended tail in case something needs to be reverted, reread, or compared. That tail now has a hard end. By 30 April 2027, perpetual customers must have stopped using EAM in production, and subscription customers should have stopped relying on it, even if the platform is still technically reachable.
That tightens the schedule for several activities that organisations habitually leave to drift:
- Final reconciliation of historical work order, asset, and inventory data between the two platforms.
- Closure or migration of long-running PMs and contracts whose anniversaries fall on either side of the cutover.
- Retirement of integrations that pointed at 7.6.1.x and never got rerouted.
If any of these are still pending in mid-2026, they belong on the programme plan now, not in the post-go-live backlog.
The Migration Workstreams That Most Often Slip
The time pressure rewards programmes that have been honest about their customisation footprint. The workstreams that consistently consume more than their scheduled effort on EAM-to-MAS migrations are:
- Validating Automation Scripts and custom MBO logic on MAS. Automation Scripts have been part of Maximo since 7.5, so most estates have a meaningful inventory of them. Each one needs a runtime check on MAS, not just a copy.
- Migrating integrations through the Integration Framework and confirming that publish channels, enterprise services, and invocation channels behave the same way against MAS endpoints.
- Reproducing Classic UI configurations on the Graphite UI in Application Designer, and deciding which screens to rebuild rather than carry forward.
- Operating an OpenShift platform that meets the production load profile, whether on-premises, on a hyperscaler, or through managed Maximo hosting.
None of these are surprising. They are simply the items that, when they slip, push the cutover date beyond the dual support window.
Procurement And Audit Cycles
Customers on perpetual licences should align internal audit and software asset management cycles with the April 2027 date. The risk is straightforward: if EAM is still running on 1 May 2027 because of an unscheduled rollback, an in-flight migration, or a forgotten test environment, the organisation is out of compliance from that moment. That is easier to defend if it has been logged, scoped, and time-boxed in advance than if it surfaces during an IBM audit.
Subscription customers have less licence exposure but should still build the date into their internal risk register. A platform without a vendor support path is a separate category from a platform that is merely deprecated.
A Short Checklist Worth Running Now
For asset management leaders carrying both EAM 7.6.1.x and MAS today, four questions are worth answering this quarter:
- Is the migration plan currently scheduled to complete production cutover before 30 April 2027, with realistic contingency?
- Is the licence type (perpetual trade-up or subscription) understood, and is the compliance implication of the date documented for the audit committee?
- Are there environments (sandbox, training, DR) on EAM 7.6.1.x that the cutover plan does not yet account for?
- Are integrations and reporting paths owned by groups outside the core Maximo team scheduled to move within the same window?
If any of these answers are no, the date itself is not the problem. The plan is.