What Is RISE with SAP?

RISE with SAP is a package of applications, services, and methodologies that helps companies transition from on-premise applications (such as SAP ERP), platforms, and infrastructure to a pure-cloud model.

This model includes infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS), platform-as-a-service (PaaS), and software-as-a-service (SaaS) with the goal of helping SAP customers run SAP S/4HANA in a more efficient, intelligent, scalable, and resilient manner.

This blog post aims to help you understand why RISE with SAP is both powerful and valuable, and SAP’s vision for RISE with SAP.

Market, Business, and Technology Drivers

If you are a current SAP ERP customer, chances are high that your organization is running at least one instance of SAP ERP 6.0 (or an earlier version) or on-premise SAP S/4HANA. As our regular interactions with SAP customers worldwide have shown, you are likely to have encountered some of the following side effects from running your on-premise ERP applications for years:

• Your company’s growth has been hindered by an inability to meet both new and unanticipated business needs in a speedy manner because of the time it takes to procure and operationalize new infrastructure investments.
• You have been making significant capital investments and expenditures in infrastructure to support your business operations. Yet, these are neither adequately supporting business needs nor enabling your company’s growth and expansion.
• You are regularly incurring high infrastructure maintenance costs since you are responsible for all aspects of infrastructure, including hardware and networking.
• You have created a tangled web of systems and applications in a piecemeal manner to meet your business needs. The complexity of your overall systems and applications landscape is often directly proportional to the size and complexity of your business. Does the figure below look familiar? Although your application landscape may not look as chaotic, it likely represents a milder version of this example. Regardless, you have incurred considerable “technical debt”—meaning that you have some applications that do not talk to each other, some applications that need to be retired, many applications that are not on their latest releases or patches, many point-to-point interfaces that are challenging to monitor, and significant security vulnerabilities. Your existing technical debt is causing your IT assets to be seen more as liabilities.

The flexibility afforded by on-premise SAP ERP and SAP S/4HANA applications (e.g., user exits, BAdIs, custom ABAP reports, custom forms, custom workflows, and configuration via the implementation guide menu) has led to the creation of many custom objects. Customers commonly report volumes of custom objects that exceed even their imagined worst-case scenarios. It is questionable as to what percentage of these objects are truly needed and what percentage was created simply because that seemed to be the most expedient path forward at the time; however, the moment for such a debate has often passed, since relevant documentation is hard to find and the personnel who created these objects may no longer be in your organization. But you are stuck with having to maintain these customizations more out of fear than solid business justification. Such customizations are a primary contributor to technical debt, and your company’s struggles to scale, grow, automate, and innovate.

• Your company has licensed many SAP applications, but the usage of some of these applications, including your SAP ERP application, is low. However, you are locked into a long-term contract that was signed years ago, leaving you feeling helpless as you realize you are paying SAP a lot more than necessary.
• Artificial intelligence (AI), especially generative AI, has taken the world by storm. SAP has been embedding AI capabilities in its cloud applications for years and providing many AI capabilities you can subscribe to. You would love to consume some of these AI capabilities, but they seem out of reach: If you are using SAP ERP, there are no embedded SAP AI capabilities, and if you are on-premise SAP S/4HANA, there are just a few that you can run out of the box.
• Because you have a plethora of software applications, you have to engage with multiple vendors. There are several downsides to this:
  • You have to maintain multiple contracts.
  • Upgrade frequency for each vendor may vary. Since all these applications eventually integrate with the SAP backbone, it is often a nightmare for companies to plan and execute each of these upgrades.
• The potential risk due to a disruption of business operations is high. Consider a scenario that occasionally occurs: one of your niche vendors goes out of business.
• A common pain point of traditional on-premise SAP applications (such as SAP ERP) is the significant time and cost required from implementation start to finish. These projects rarely take just months; they usually last at least a year, and sometimes several years, resulting in a high cost for customers. This poses a major barrier to entry for midsize customers who lack the necessary budget and time.
• You find SAP GUI to be an unpleasant, if not downright painful, user experience. You want an intuitive, productive, contextual, smart, and engaging user experience. You are also finding it difficult to hire young talent because your best candidates perceive SAP GUI as archaic and consider system interactions to be very antiquated compared to the apps on their mobile devices.
• The end-of-maintenance deadline for SAP ERP is approaching. Consider the timeline in the next figure. While current SAP ERP customers often say they have until the end of 2027 before mainstream maintenance ends, this is true only if you are on Enhancement Package (EHP) 6 or higher. If you are on EHP 5 or lower, you only have until the end of 2025—unless you upgrade to EHP 6 or higher to buy yourself more time. Regardless, there is one key statistic to emphasize: the last update to SAP ERP 6.0 took place in 2016. If you are looking to defer your move to SAP S/4HANA via RISE with SAP for another few years and continue with a business-as-usual approach, note that you are running an application that is at least eight years old at the time of writing. As a result, you are missing out on many comprehensive AI-powered functional and industry-specific business capabilities that SAP S/4HANA provides.

Without belaboring the need to transition out of an old application, let’s focus momentarily on the box labeled Extended Maintenance at the top of the figure. From the end of 2027 to the end of 2030, SAP will still support current SAP ERP customers, but this maintenance cost will be over and above what they currently pay. After 2030, current SAP ERP customers will either have to support their SAP ERP application themselves or engage a third-party maintenance provider.

SAP introduced RISE with SAP in March 2021 to provide customers an offering of subscription- based capabilities and services that would help them overcome these challenges in an accelerated manner.

SAP’s Vision for RISE with SAP

So, what exactly is RISE with SAP? It is a comprehensive offering that helps companies run their business in the cloud. At the heart of this comprehensive offering is SAP S/4HANA Cloud Private Edition, an intelligent cloud ERP solution powered by AI designed for customers currently running SAP ERP and/or on-premise SAP S/4HANA. This core cloud ERP offering is supplemented by capabilities and services that accelerate companies’ transition to the cloud, no matter where they are in their journey.

SAP’s vision for RISE with SAP contains the following key elements:

• Build a foundation for the future with a cloud ERP core that will support and enable your organization’s strategic and operational business needs.
• Help customers unleash the power of SAP’s cloud applications portfolio to run as intelligent, continuously innovative enterprises without compromising on security and compliance.
• Enable customers to embed innovation into their business processes.
• Make the process of transitioning from their current on-premise setup to the cloud a smooth and reliable one.

There are a few collateral aspects of these guiding principles that need to be emphasized. With RISE with SAP, SAP’s vision also is to:

• Meet customers where they are in their cloud journey and partner with them, guiding them every step of the way.
• Enable customers to focus on realizing strategic business needs and priorities from their SAP investments, rather than getting mired in the tactical aspects of operating and maintaining their technology and application landscape.
• Minimize or eliminate technical debt over time and instead build technical wealth.

Let’s dig into the various components of RISE with SAP that facilitate this vision.

RISE with SAP is a comprehensive offering of solutions and services from SAP that helps companies run in the cloud as agile, intelligent, and innovative enterprises. It includes the following three components, as shown in the figure below:

• Software: SAP S/4HANA Cloud Private Edition is a cloud ERP system with line-of-business (LOB) applications and extensions, partner extensions, and business AI functionality.
• Platform: SAP Business Technology Platform (SAP BTP) manages data, analytics, application development, integration, and core AI functionalities.
• Infrastructure: Infrastructure is provided by hyperscalers such as Microsoft Azure, Amazon Web Services, and Google Cloud in the United States. 

By providing you with IaaS, PaaS, and SaaS in the cloud, SAP enables you to pivot from your current on-premise SAP ERP-based landscape to a completely cloud-based landscape with SAP S/4HANA Cloud as your ERP core. The same applies if you are a new SAP customer: you can supplant your existing hodgepodge of on-premise and cloud legacy applications with a fully cloud-based landscape using RISE with SAP.

Editor’s note: This post has been adapted from a section of the e-book Introducing RISE with SAP by Anurag Barua.