Demystifying SAP Rise

SAP on the 27th of January 2021 announced Rise with SAP, whose goal is to transform an organisation’s business into an intelligent enterprise and provide a significant uplift in their operating model, business capability, and change in their Capex, Opex costs.SAP Rise offering will provide customers with a path to the Intelligent Enterprise regardless of the starting point of their existing landscape or business process complexity.

In a nutshell “RISE will offer a subscription offering of SAP Solutions that combines Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) from a chosen hyper scaler, Cloud Managed Services (CMS) from SAP, and Application Managed Services (AMS) from a systems integrator into a single offering and contract”.

The key point being existing SAP ECC customers, can move their existing landscape to Rise and then enabled by Tools offered by SAP easily transition into SAP S/4 and operate their SAP systems in a SaaS delivery model.

SAP Rise suggests three steps to achieve the goal of a pure S/4HANA Cloud Target state

• Business Process Redesign:using services such as SAP workflow,iRPA,AI, and Signavio(SAP’s latest acquisition) to continuously analyse how current customer business processes perform, benchmark them against industry standards and provide tailored recommendations. The services also suggest how to adopt new business models, automate and standardise processes.
• Technical Migration:provides tools and services to enable frictionless migration to a standard, modular and flexible solution landscape. The tools provide recommendations to get rid of modifications and custom code and harmonising towards a single source of truth.
• Building your Intelligent Enterprise:Support for hosting infrastructure in any one of the major hyperscalers, thus reducing the overall TCO. Enabled by the SAP Business Technology Platform (SAP Cloud platform), extend the digital ERP core by services such as AI, workflow, etc, and keep the core clean of any modifications. Provide access to the Business Network enabling stakeholders to collaborate and provide visibility across the supply chain.

Most existing SAP ECC Customers are hesitant to take up the SAP S/4 journey primarily due to the burden of cost, implication on existing contracts, and massive change process involved.SAP Rise will help in addressing some of these challenges by providing a single contract and a single set of SLAs across the entire SAP Stack. It also provides the potential ability to reduce wastage in contracts by rolling existing shelf-ware into these contracts. It also provides an avenue to reduce year on year enterprise supports costs by moving to a more Opex Model from a Capex model.

Is SAP Rise and movement to SAP Private Cloud SaaS model suitable to every SAP customer. The straight answer is No, It depends on the customers existing business process customisation and ability to adapt standard business best practices. There are other S/4 Cloud alternatives based on the answers to the above question such as SAP S/4 essentials cloud.In my later blogs,I will be providing information on various SAP Cloud options, the use-cases for every cloud option.

If you want to have an obligation-free conversation on what is the best cloud option for your business. Please feel free to reach out to me at kaushik.hegde@ibm.com