This is a key decision facing most organisations that run their SAP estate in an on-premise environment or natively on a hyperscaler and are thinking about the future.
It is not an easy decision to make and requires deep analysis relating to their current operating model, the resource and skill mix available and SAP’s future roadmap and strategy. Organizations also need to identify the expected operational, commercial and process benefits to justify the move to RISE and change their status quo.
Having been associated with RISE with SAP since its inception, I have seen how SAP’s offering has matured over the years. SAP is making significant investments into the operational and delivery capabilities of RISE. SAP’s strategy has also evolved to fully support this cloud model. It is my firm belief that NOW is the right time for customers to decide and move to RISE with SAP. Here are some of the reasons.
Maturity
RISE with SAP was launched by SAP’s CEO, Christian Klein in January 2021. Since then, the offering has matured significantly. The commercialisation of a large proportion of SAP’s previously on-premise solution offerings has occurred to allow them to now be offered in the cloud model.
There has been significant investment in tools, automation and people so that the delivery of the cloud service is world class. The ‘Enterprise Cloud Services’ or ECS organisation is the delivery arm of SAP for the RISE offering where these investments have occurred.
ECS supports the operational delivery & support of the RISE offering and is separate to the implementation services which implements S/4HANA. ECS is purely involved in the operational, day-to-day, business-as-usual (BAU) maintenance and management of customer’s SAP landscape under RISE.
New Board Area – Customer Services & Delivery
At the start of 2024, a new board area was established called, ‘Customer Services & Delivery’ which brings together all the resources involved in the architecture and delivery of RISE and associated services. This board area now has architecture and pre-sales teams involved in architecting our customer’s cloud solutions (Cloud architects), the services teams that implement the S/4HANA capabilities (Services teams) and the teams involved in the actual day-to-day operational delivery of service for RISE customers (ECS team).
This was a strategic decision and is extremely important as it reflects the internal transformation within SAP as it expands from an engineering, product development, and a sales organisation, into a cloud service provider ensuring customer success through adoption and delivery of cloud services and focuses on achieving successful customer outcomes.
Our customers will gain from RISE with SAP by utilising SAP’s expertise and experience in managing S/4HANA customers globally and benefiting from SAP’s focus on customer adoption and outcome driven approach.
You can read about these here.
Incentives
Since RISE with SAP launched, SAP has been listening to customer feedback and has released the RISE with SAP Migration and Modernisation program in Jan 2024. The news article is here.
Through this program SAP recognises the complexity of the transformation required and offers to actively support customers on their journey to the cloud and to help make the transition easier.
The program offers customers a Migration Methodology to provide guidance across their migration journey, providing roadmaps for innovations, and more significantly, it offers commercial incentives for customers moving to RISE.
This incentive is called the RISE Transformation Incentive and is a limited time fund through till the end of 2024 that SAP has created to support customers moving to RISE. Through this program, SAP customers can leverage this fund and receive incentives in the form of credits as a means of offsetting some of the costs involved in their transformation journeys.
This incentive will be offered to current SAP S/4HANA and SAP ECC on-premise customers moving their SAP landscape to RISE and they will stand to gain credits as a percentage of the amount of their RISE with SAP subscription. These credits can be utilized to offset either the on-premise maintenance costs, implementation services costs or the cost of the RISE subscription fee itself.
To date I have engaged with several customers that have benefited from this incentive. It is my view that this incentive fund represents a significant opportunity for customers to initiate their move to RISE in 2024.
Partner Ecosystem
When RISE was first launched, our partner ecosystem was quite apprehensive. However, over time, our partners have also understood that RISE with SAP is at the core of the SAP Cloud Strategy and have now jointly worked with SAP to tailor their own offerings based on the RISE implementation methodologies.
Several of SAP’s partners have also become RISE customers including Accenture, IBM, Wipro, HCL, Microsoft, which further goes to show the strength of the offering and the trust that partners, most of whom have their own SAP practices, bestow upon SAP in managing their SAP landscapes for them.
So, if you are sitting on the fence and trying to decide whether the time is right to move to RISE, I would say that 2024 is definitely the year you should make the decision and take the plunge. I can safely say that you will get the kind of support from SAP that you would have never seen before!
