A 25,000 employee telecom conglomerate across Singapore, Malaysia, Thailand, and the Philippines cut RISE with SAP cost by thirty percent and won contract flexibility on BTP overage, indirect access, and annual escalator. The buyer side reference for procurement and CIO leaders heading into RISE conversion.
A telecom conglomerate operating across four Asia Pacific markets converted from on premise SAP ECC to RISE with SAP and cut the headline RISE price by thirty percent.
The win sat in three levers. The Full Use Equivalent baseline, the BTP overage clause, and the indirect access redline. Each one moved real money. The combined saving was USD 14.4 million across the five year RISE term.
Read this with the SAP knowledge hub, the RISE negotiation landing, the RISE hidden costs guide, and the indirect access guide. Pair it with the SAP services page and the Vendor Shield subscription.
The client operates a telecom group across four Asia Pacific markets. The SAP estate runs ECC 6.0 with industry add ons, BW data warehouse, and a series of CRM, billing, and provisioning integrations.
The 2027 ECC end of maintenance deadline forced a conversion decision. The CIO and CFO wanted RISE with SAP as the conversion path and asked Redress to run the buyer side negotiation in parallel.
SAP opened the RISE conversation with a USD 48M five year quote based on a 12,000 FUE baseline, a 35 percent BTP overage rate, and a seven percent annual escalator.
| Item | Quote | Concern |
|---|---|---|
| FUE baseline | 12,000 FUE | Includes shelfware from ECC license history |
| RISE annual fee | USD 9.6M year one | Reflects inflated FUE baseline |
| BTP overage rate | USD 0.35 per BTP unit | No cap on year over year consumption uplift |
| Annual escalator | 7 percent | Above market for cloud subscription |
| Indirect access | Document license model | No cap on read user count |
| Migration term | 12 months go live | Tight against industry add on complexity |
| Total five year | USD 48M | Headline figure unacceptable to CFO |
The 12,000 FUE position reflected the historic SAP order forms, not the actual usage. License cleanup analysis identified 3,500 FUE of unused or duplicated entitlements that the client had paid for but never deployed in production.
Redress ran a structured eight month engagement across four phases. License baseline, BATNA development, RISE negotiation, and contract redline.
The negotiation ran across four rounds with the SAP local Asia Pacific account team and the SAP regional escalation desk. Each round narrowed the gap on FUE baseline, BTP overage, and escalator.
The thirty percent saving did not come from negotiation pressure. It came from eight months of baseline work that gave the procurement team the data to reject the SAP opening position with confidence. Preparation beat tactics every time.
The final RISE deal closed at USD 33.6M across five years, a thirty percent reduction on the SAP opening position. The contract carries flexibility on BTP, indirect access, escalator, and exit.
| Item | Opening | Final | Movement |
|---|---|---|---|
| FUE baseline | 12,000 | 8,500 | Down 3,500 |
| RISE annual fee year one | USD 9.6M | USD 6.5M | Down USD 3.1M |
| BTP overage cap | None | 20 percent | Cap added |
| Annual escalator | 7 percent | 3 percent | Down 4 points |
| Indirect access | Document | Static read user | Model changed |
| Migration term | 12 months | 18 months | Added 6 months |
| Exit clause | None | Year four | Added |
| Five year total | USD 48M | USD 33.6M | Down USD 14.4M |
Five lessons sit inside this deal that apply to any RISE conversion across the Asia Pacific region or beyond.
The seven step checklist below is the buyer side starting position before any RISE with SAP conversion conversation.
Eight months from kickoff to final signature. Three months on license baseline and BATNA development, three months on the four round RISE negotiation, and two months on contract redline and signature. The preparation phase delivered most of the value before the SAP conversation opened.
The 12,000 FUE position reflected the historic SAP order forms across two decades of acquisition activity. The customer had bought licenses for projects that never deployed, retained licenses for employees who had left, and never reconciled the order form against actual usage. License cleanup is a standard first step for any RISE conversion.
The contract specifies a year over year cap on the BTP consumption rate uplift. If BTP usage doubles in year three, the per unit price cannot rise more than twenty percent over the year two price. The cap protects against the SAP discount erosion that often hits BTP consumers in years three and four.
Yes. Rimini Street and Spinnaker Support both quoted on the existing ECC estate at roughly fifty percent of the SAP annual support fee. The third party quote functioned as a real BATNA throughout the negotiation. The customer reserved the right to keep ECC and use third party support if the RISE price did not move.
The contract moved from the document license model to a static read user count. Document licensing prices each document transmitted between non SAP systems and SAP. Static read user prices a fixed user count regardless of document volume. The static model removed the surprise audit exposure that document licensing creates.
Redress runs RISE conversion advisory inside the Vendor Shield subscription and the Renewal Program. Every engagement is led by a former SAP commercial executive on the buyer side and supported by the RISE benchmark we maintain across recent conversions at similar scale and geography.
Redress runs SAP advisory inside the Vendor Shield subscription, the Renewal Program, the Benchmark Program, and the Software Spend Assessment.
Read the related benchmarking, about us, locations, and contact pages.
A buyer side reference on RISE with SAP conversion. FUE baseline math, BTP overage cap, indirect access redline, annual escalator, and exit clause across the five year RISE term.
Independent. Buyer side. Written for CIOs, CFOs, and procurement leaders carrying SAP ECC heading into the 2027 end of maintenance deadline. No SAP influence. No sales kickback.
Open the white paper in your browser. Corporate email only.
Open the Paper →The thirty percent saving did not come from negotiation pressure. It came from eight months of baseline work that gave the procurement team the data to reject the SAP opening position with confidence. Preparation beat tactics every time.
We have run 500+ enterprise clients across 11 publishers. Every engagement starts with one conversation.
RISE conversion benchmarks, BTP overage patterns, indirect access settlement math, and ECC support exit posture across every SAP engagement we run on the buyer side.
Once a month. Audit patterns, renewal benchmarks, vendor commercial signals across Oracle, Microsoft, SAP, Salesforce, IBM, Broadcom, AWS, Google Cloud, ServiceNow, Workday, Cisco, and the GenAI vendors. No follow up sales pressure.
Free providers (Gmail, Yahoo, Outlook) cannot subscribe. Work email only. Unsubscribe in one click.
