Enterprises facing the end of ECC support have three real paths in 2026, not two. This report compares the full term cost, lock in, and operating model across stay on ECC, S/4HANA on premise, and RISE with SAP, from the inside of more than sixty live decisions.
Enterprises facing the end of SAP ECC support are not choosing between modernization and the status quo. They are choosing among three paths with three full term cost curves, three sets of lock in, and three different answers to the same question: who pays for the move and when.
About this report
This report compares the three SAP paths a global enterprise can take in 2026 as ECC standard support runs out. It reads as a directional benchmark, not a price list, and draws on three inputs.
Numbers appear as defensible bands, not single points. SAP estates vary widely with FUE counts, module mix, customization depth, and infrastructure age, and a single decimal would imply a precision the comparison cannot honestly carry.
Three paths sit on the table in 2026, and the SAP account team usually opens with two. The third path, stay on a supported ECC through 2030 with the extended maintenance offer, is real and worth modeling.
It is rarely the right end state. It is almost always the right baseline. Without it, every RISE quote reads as a price taker negotiation.
The choice between the other two, S/4HANA on premise and RISE with SAP, is not a choice between modern and legacy. Both run on the same S/4HANA code line.
The real difference is who operates the platform, who owns the contract surface, and how the cost is shaped across the term. That is the comparison this report makes.
Standard support for ECC ends at the close of 2027. Extended maintenance runs through 2030 at a published premium of two percentage points on the existing support base.
Beyond 2030, optional customer specific maintenance is available at a further premium, with shrinking inclusions. The platform keeps running. New legal change and selected platform support move out of standard scope.
For estates that are stable, low risk, and unlikely to need new SAP capability before 2030, this path is the cheapest in cash terms over the next four years. It is not a future. It is runway.
S/4HANA on premise is the on platform successor to ECC, run on infrastructure the customer owns or leases. The application sits in the customer's data center or in a hyperscaler region under their own cloud account.
The license is bought outright or subscribed. The maintenance is the familiar SAP support stream. The customer keeps the database, the basis layer, and the operating team.
This path keeps the customer in control of infrastructure choices and the operational rhythm of the SAP team. It also keeps the contract surface narrow. The SAP relationship is licenses and support, not a managed service.
RISE is a subscription bundle. It wraps the S/4HANA application, the infrastructure to run it, and a basic level of managed operations into a single contract.
SAP operates the platform on the customer's behalf in a hyperscaler region. The customer never sees the underlying Azure, AWS, or Google Cloud invoice. SAP procures it and bills it inside the subscription.
RISE is sold as the path to a managed S/4HANA, and for many customers it is the path of least resistance. It is also the path with the most lock in, the widest contract surface, and the largest full term price tag in our deals.
GROW with SAP is the SAP public cloud edition for new customers and mid market estates. It is not usually the right path for a large ECC estate moving onto S/4HANA, because it constrains customization and configuration.
For an enterprise with material custom code, GROW is mentioned and discounted in the early scoping conversations. The three paths above are the realistic set.
The honest comparison is full term, not first year. RISE looks competitive on the opening slide because the bundle hides the parts the customer used to pay for separately.
The five year math reads differently when each path carries the same scope on both sides. That is the comparison this section makes, against the engagement file rather than the SAP pitch.
Across the SAP estates we benchmarked in 2024 and 2025, the picture was consistent. Stay on ECC remained the cheapest near term path through 2027. S/4HANA on premise sat in the middle.
RISE landed at the top of the band, often 35 to 55 percent above the on premise full term once the comparison was normalized for scope and operating model.
RISE is priced on FUE, the Full User Equivalent, against the bundled platform. The subscription opens around 12 to 18 percent above the on premise application license equivalent on year one.
The premium compounds with the annual uplift, the AI add ons, and the optional services that move outside the base bundle as scope grows. By year five, the gap is materially wider, in line with the broader software repricing the Gartner IT spending forecast describes.
The headline savings against on premise come from the parts SAP runs on the customer's behalf. The honest comparison adds the equivalent cost of the on premise team back into the RISE side.
After that adjustment, the bundle premium is the actual delta. In our panel it ran 35 to 55 percent on a like for like scope, sometimes more for customers with strong existing capability.
On premise S/4HANA carries a known license cost or subscription, the SAP maintenance fee, the hyperscaler or data center spend, and the operations team. Most existing SAP customers already carry the last three lines.
The new line is the upgrade and the S/4HANA license or conversion fee. That is the part the program plan needs to fund, not the entire operating stack.
This path scales with the customer's own efficiency. Buyers with mature SAP teams and depreciated infrastructure ride the existing cost base. Buyers without those advantages see a smaller gap to RISE.
ECC stays the cheapest path in cash terms through 2027 by a wide margin. The extended maintenance premium adds two percentage points on the support base from 2028 onward.
Through 2030 the line is still well below either move path. It does not include any new SAP capability and the buyer takes on the residual change management work that the standard support stream used to absorb.
This is not a free option. It carries the cost of the move it defers. Used as runway to plan the next path properly, the saved spend buys time and leverage. Used as a permanent destination, it leaves the customer outside SAP's roadmap.
The numbers in this section are bands, not points. The right band for a specific estate depends on the FUE count, the module mix, the customization depth, and the maturity of the basis team.
A buyer with a small standard ECC and a weak operations team narrows the gap to RISE. A buyer with a deep custom estate and a strong team widens it. The model has to match the estate.
Path comparison at a glance
| Path | Five year cost band | Customer operates | Lock in profile | Best fit |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Stay on ECC plus extended maintenance | Lowest through 2030, then sharp step up | Yes, no change | Low, contract status quo | Stable estates buying runway |
| S/4HANA on premise | Middle, scales with team and infrastructure | Yes, same operating model | Moderate, license and maintenance | Mature SAP shops with skilled teams |
| RISE with SAP | Highest in our panel by 35 to 55 percent | No, SAP runs the platform | High, bundled exit and data egress | Buyers who want SAP to operate the stack |
The 2027 date is a deadline only for standard support. The end of the runway is 2030, and the path between those two markers shapes every commercial conversation.
Buyers who treat 2027 as the end of the road overpay. Buyers who treat 2030 as the end use the runway as leverage. The difference is visible in the RISE quote they get back.
SAP's own materials describe the support strategy plainly on the SAP maintenance and support strategy page. Read it before any path conversation.
The extended maintenance premium is two percentage points on top of the existing support base from 2028 onward. On a typical ECC support spend, that is a manageable increase.
Measured against the cash impact of starting a full move in 2027 to avoid the premium, the math usually favors taking the extension. The premium is real but small relative to the move budget it defers.
The harder cost is what comes off the table. New legal change, certain regulatory updates, and selected platform support shift to extended scope only.
Buyers who depend on continuous tax or statutory updates need to model whether their country is covered before they commit to the runway. The coverage matrix is geography specific.
The runway changes the SAP conversation. A buyer who has already approved internally to take the extended path through 2030 is not in a hurry. That posture sits very differently across the table.
Compare it to a buyer who has accepted the 2027 deadline as the move date. The second buyer has no time. The first has eighteen months of optionality, and the vendor knows it.
Buyers who hold this posture quietly, with a real plan behind it, almost always see a better RISE or on premise offer. The leverage is not the threat to never move. It is the demonstrated ability to wait.
Customer specific maintenance is the only SAP supplied option after 2030, and its inclusions shrink steadily. Third party support enters the conversation for customers who do not see a S/4HANA business case worth the price by then.
Both options have implications for any future return to SAP. Third party support voids certain SAP support rights and reshapes the conversation if the customer ever wants to come back onto a SAP path.
This is the corner where the runway turns into a strategy. The honest plan treats 2030 as the latest credible decision date, not a panic point, and uses the gap between 2027 and 2030 to negotiate either path on the buyer's terms.
Finance should budget the move as the next major program, not as the next budget cycle. Treating the move as urgent locks the timeline. Treating it as planned gives the team room to prepare.
The cleanest framing is a program with two milestones. The first is the path selection by mid 2028. The second is the move completion by end of 2030. Both are achievable on every path.
RISE is not a product. It is a bundle. The licensing in the middle is the same S/4HANA application that runs on premise. The differences are the wrapper, the operating model, and the contract surface around it.
Understanding what is inside the bundle is the first step in pricing it honestly. SAP describes the components on its RISE product page and the underlying application on its S/4HANA product page.
The four main inclusions are the application subscription, the cloud infrastructure, a basic level of managed operations, and the surrounding services. We unpack each below.
The application part of RISE is the S/4HANA Cloud Private Edition. Priced on FUE, it sits on the same code line as S/4HANA on premise.
For a customer with an equivalent on premise license, the application line in RISE is the closest like for like comparison. It is also the smaller of the two cost gaps between the paths.
RISE wraps the hyperscaler relationship. SAP procures the cloud infrastructure on the customer's behalf and bills it as part of the subscription.
The customer never sees the underlying Azure, AWS, or Google Cloud invoice for the SAP workload. SAP holds that paper. The customer holds only the RISE invoice.
This is convenient and expensive. The hyperscaler discount the customer would have earned through its own enterprise cloud agreement does not flow through.
For customers with a large hyperscaler commit, the lost optimization opportunity can be material across the term. It is the single largest hidden cost in the RISE quote we see.
RISE includes a basic managed operations layer. Patching, basis support, and infrastructure monitoring sit inside the subscription. That is the part the bundle is built to deliver.
Application functional support, custom code maintenance, and the wider SAP run team are not in the base bundle. They cost extra, often inside an SAP services attach or a partner contract.
The buyer side reading is that RISE manages the platform and the customer still pays a partner or an internal team to run the application. The savings against on premise are real but smaller than the bundle marketing implies.
Around the core, RISE carries a credit pool for surrounding services, AI add ons, and Business Technology Platform consumption. These layers compound the subscription quickly.
Buyers should model the credit burn against actual planned usage, not against the included headline. A credit pool that looks generous on the slide often runs out in year two.
Joule, the SAP AI overlay, is the newest line item to watch. It is priced inside RISE on a consumption basis and shows up later in the cost curve, well after the contract is signed.
RISE does not include the application functional support team. It does not include the custom code maintenance. It does not include the partner integration spend.
It also does not include the Clean Core remediation bill, which is paid out of the customer's program budget on any move path. Reading the bundle as inclusive of these costs is the most common pricing error in the deals we have reviewed.
What is bundled and what is not, RISE versus S/4HANA on premise
| Layer | S/4HANA on premise | RISE with SAP |
|---|---|---|
| Application license | Bought or subscribed, on platform | Subscription, on platform, FUE priced |
| Hyperscaler infrastructure | Customer relationship, customer discount | SAP procured, no customer discount pass through |
| Basis and platform operations | Customer or partner run | Included at basic level |
| Application functional support | Customer or partner run | Extra, partner or SAP services |
| Tax, legal, and statutory updates | Customer applied | Included for in scope geographies |
| BTP credits and AI add ons | Bought separately as needed | Credit pool, consumption priced |
| Exit, data egress, and conversion | Standard SAP terms | Bundled exit clauses, often constrained |
The standard pitch is that RISE is the modernization path and on premise is legacy. We disagree that the bundle is automatically the right answer. In a large share of the SAP estates we modeled across 2024 and 2025, S/4HANA on premise on a hyperscaler under the customer's own cloud agreement came out cheaper across the full term than RISE by 35 to 55 percent, especially for customers with mature basis teams, an enterprise hyperscaler commitment, or depreciated hardware. The buyer side move is to model all three paths honestly against a like for like scope, including ECC plus extended maintenance through 2030, and negotiate from the cheapest defensible baseline.
Source: Redress Compliance advisory engagement file, 2024 to 2025.
RISE is the path of least resistance. It is rarely the path of least cost. The buyer who knows the difference is the buyer who keeps the choice open.
The headline path comparison hides the variance that decides the bill. Customization depth is the largest swing factor. Industry context is the second.
A high volume manufacturing estate with a thousand custom enhancements and a financial services estate with thirty look like different problems on the project plan. They should look like different problems on the price comparison.
Customization is the part SAP cannot price upfront. A heavily modified ECC estate carries a remediation bill on every move path.
The bill is sized to the user enhancements and modifications that are not Clean Core compatible. Across our engagement file, it ran 18 to 30 percent of the total move budget on the more customized estates.
The work is the same on either move path. Whether the destination is S/4HANA on premise or RISE, the customer or its partner has to refactor the same code.
RISE does not absorb this cost. It runs in parallel to it, and it is paid by the customer's services budget. The bundle is the operating model. The remediation is the application.
Heavy manufacturing estates carry the deepest customization. They also carry the strongest dependency on industry engines and the largest plant level integrations.
The Clean Core conversation is hardest here, because shop floor logic often sits outside SAP's standard process. The path comparison is dominated by the remediation cost, not by the RISE versus on premise spread.
The decision becomes whether the operating model is worth the bundled premium, after the remediation bill is paid on both sides. For most manufacturers we have advised, the answer is no.
Financial services and public sector estates carry stricter data residency, audit, and operational risk constraints. RISE has matured here, but the contract negotiation is heavier.
Data residency, encryption key control, and audit cooperation clauses are often the part of the deal that takes longest to land. They also drive most of the contract addenda that get attached to a RISE order form.
The bundle premium is sometimes paid as the cost of getting one accountable counterparty for the platform, audit trail, and continuity. The on premise side compensates by giving full control to the customer's existing operating and security model.
Estates with relatively standard SAP, modest customization, and modern hardware are the customers RISE is most natural for. The remediation bill is smaller.
The operating model gap is wider in RISE's favor. The bundle premium looks more proportional to the value of having SAP run the platform.
Even in this segment, the honest model still favors negotiating both paths in parallel. The on premise quote is the lever that holds the RISE quote down.
Global estates with multiple legal entities introduce a separate question. RISE contracts can be regional, and a buyer may want a different path in different markets.
The contract addenda for multi entity RISE are significant. A clean buyer side approach holds the cross entity terms as a separate addendum, with the same exit and data egress clauses across markets.
Every path carries lock in. The question is where the lock sits, who holds the key, and what it costs to unlock when the buyer wants to change direction.
Reading the lock in upfront is the cheapest insurance on a long term commitment. It is also the part of the conversation the vendor account team is least eager to lead.
The ECC path locks the customer to SAP support for a defined period, with the off ramps already specified. Third party support, customer specific maintenance, and a future S/4HANA conversion all stay on the table.
The lock in is light, because the contract surface is narrow and the rights are familiar. The customer is buying time, not new commitments.
On premise S/4HANA locks the customer into the SAP license, the maintenance stream, and the operational dependency on its own SAP team. Exit options remain.
Those options include third party support, conversion to RISE later, or a longer term return to a customer specific maintenance posture. The doors are still open.
The lock is moderate because the customer keeps control of the data, the database, and the operating layer. Anything the customer owns can be moved. Anything the customer owns is not on the vendor's exit ramp.
RISE locks the customer into SAP for the application, the infrastructure procurement, the basic operations, and the data exit terms. The contract surface is the widest of the three paths.
The bundle that produces the convenience also produces the lock. The customer cannot unbundle parts at renewal without renegotiating the whole agreement.
The exit terms are the largest commercial risk. Data egress windows, conversion of FUE entitlements back to on premise licenses, and the rights to keep running on the underlying hyperscaler after the RISE contract ends all sit inside the bundle.
They are negotiable up front. They are very hard to recover later. The right time to fix them is at signing, while SAP still wants the deal.
The cheapest counter to lock in is to keep operating capability inside the buyer organization. Customers who outsource everything to RISE often spend less in the first year and more across the term.
The reason is simple. They no longer have the team to run a credible alternative when the renewal arrives. Without an alternative, the renewal is priced against a captive buyer.
Five clauses do most of the work. Capped annual uplift. Defined FUE conversion ratios out of RISE. Specified data egress windows. Hyperscaler continuation rights. A renewal benchmarking right.
None of these clauses block a future RISE renewal. They simply preserve the customer's ability to choose at the next decision point, which is what lock in is about.
Some RISE quotes open higher than others, and the difference is usually visible months ahead. A handful of signals reliably flag a deal that will price near the top of the SAP band.
Reading the signals early lets the buyer adjust posture, timing, and team before the first quote arrives. After the quote arrives, the room to maneuver narrows quickly.
The strongest signal is a buyer arriving inside twelve months of the ECC end of standard support without a path decision. The vendor reads the deadline pressure and prices into it.
The defense is the extended maintenance posture. A buyer who has approved internally to take the runway through 2030 removes the deadline as a lever, even if the runway is not the end state.
A buyer whose SAP basis capability has been cut, outsourced, or rotated out sends a different signal than a buyer with a mature operating team.
The first is a captive customer for the managed bundle. The second is a credible operator who can choose. The RISE quote reflects which one is sitting across the table.
Customers without an enterprise hyperscaler agreement gain less from the on premise path on a hyperscaler. The bundle premium looks smaller because the alternative is more expensive in their world.
Customers with a large enterprise Azure, AWS, or Google Cloud commitment see the on premise path most attractively. The hyperscaler discount the customer has already earned flows through directly to the alternative.
A buyer who has not started Clean Core remediation by the time of the RISE conversation is exposed twice. First, the remediation bill is unknown. Second, the timeline pressure compounds.
The defense is to scope the remediation work independently, before the RISE quote arrives. A known number narrows the deal. An unknown one becomes the SAP team's framing for the whole conversation.
A board that has told the SAP team to be on RISE by a specific date hands the vendor a price floor. The SAP account team responds to that signal accurately and prices to it.
The buyer side counter is to let the board know that the path decision is the buyer's, with a defended timeline and a costed alternative. The deadline is then a goal, not a constraint.
Customers with a sister entity already on RISE often pay more than first time RISE buyers. The vendor knows the precedent inside the group and prices to it.
The buyer side response is to keep the entity level negotiations separate where possible, with explicit firewalls between the existing RISE contract terms and the new one. SAP will resist this, which is itself a signal.
Preparation is where the gap between the RISE pitch and the realized RISE quote is built. Buyers who arrive at the table prepared see a different SAP. Buyers who do not see only one path.
The preparation work breaks into four blocks. A clean estate baseline. A path model that runs all three options on the same scope. A governance structure that holds the timeline. An advisor relationship that brings the comparable deals back.
The baseline is the FUE count, the user enhancement inventory, the database footprint, and the integration map. Without it, every path quote is priced against the vendor's view of the estate, not the buyer's.
SAP runs the USMM and the LAW report annually. The buyer should run them more often than that, and treat the output as the start of the conversation. A surprised buyer at the SAP table is a buyer who paid too much.
The baseline also names the custom code that will not survive Clean Core. That number drives the remediation budget on every move path, and it does not appear in any RISE quote.
The honest model carries the same scope on all three sides. ECC plus extended maintenance through 2030. S/4HANA on premise on a hyperscaler under the customer's own cloud agreement. RISE with SAP at the same FUE count.
Each path carries the same Clean Core remediation line. Each carries the same operations cost, either inside the bundle or paid separately. Each carries the same five year horizon.
The model is the answer to the SAP question. When the account team says RISE is cheaper, the model says against what scope and what assumptions. The first conversation usually ends differently after that.
The SAP path decision needs one owner, usually in procurement or a software asset management function, with the authority to run the model and the freedom to challenge the SAP account team.
The owner is measured on realized cost against benchmark, not on closing the deal quickly. That measure matters. An owner rewarded for speed accepts the first RISE quote. An owner rewarded for realized cost runs the comparison.
Finance and IT sit alongside the owner. Finance holds the budget band and the contingency. IT confirms the technical assumptions, the Clean Core scope, and the hyperscaler economics.
The cheapest advisor engagement is the one that starts before the first SAP response. The most expensive is the one that arrives after the RISE quote has been accepted internally.
The reason is simple. The advisor brings the comparable deals, the recent rate environment, and the buyer side language that resets the conversation. None of those land if the deal is already framed as a yes.
Across our SAP engagements, the buyers who engaged before the first response saw realized RISE uplifts 20 to 30 percent below the comparable group that engaged after. The early engagement pays for itself many times over.
The right starting window is eighteen to twenty four months before the ECC end of standard support, or the equivalent point for a customer on an unusual support agreement.
That window gives finance the time to model all three paths. It gives IT the time to assess customization depth. It gives procurement the time to negotiate either RISE or on premise against a credible alternative.
Buyers who start inside twelve months almost always end up paying the RISE opening ask. The timeline itself becomes the vendor's strongest lever, and the lever is hard to neutralize from inside the contract window.
An RFP is overkill for some SAP path decisions. For others it is the single move that holds the price down. The dividing line is whether the customer has a credible second supplier on the operating side.
If the customer can credibly run S/4HANA itself, the RFP is between RISE and on premise, with the on premise quote run through a partner. If not, the RFP is between RISE editions and operating tiers.
Either way the RFP needs a defined scope, a fixed evaluation grid, and a time bound response window. SAP responds to structured asks. It does not respond well to open ended ones.
Model both against a like for like scope and the cost of doing nothing through 2030.
In the SAP estates our team benchmarked across 2024 and 2025, S/4HANA on premise on a hyperscaler under the customer's own cloud agreement landed 35 to 55 percent below RISE across the full term for mature buyers with skilled basis teams.
RISE is a fit when the customer wants SAP to operate the platform and accepts the bundle premium for that operating model.
RISE is FUE priced for the application, plus the bundled hyperscaler infrastructure, plus a basic managed operations layer, plus a credit pool for BTP and AI.
The opening year one ask typically runs 12 to 18 percent above the equivalent on premise application line, and the bundle premium compounds with annual uplift, AI attach, and consumption. The honest comparison adds the equivalent on premise operations cost back to RISE before reading the gap.
SAP standard support for the ECC line ends at the close of 2027. Extended maintenance runs through the end of 2030 at a two percentage point premium on the existing support base. Customer specific maintenance is available beyond 2030 at a further premium, with reduced inclusions.
The official path is described in the SAP maintenance and support strategy page.
Yes, as runway rather than a destination. The extended maintenance offer carries the platform with a measured premium and gives the buyer the time to plan a move properly. The trade off is that some new legal change, regulatory updates, and platform support move out of the standard scope.
Customers in geographies where statutory updates are critical need to confirm coverage before relying on the runway.
RISE bundles the S/4HANA application, the hyperscaler infrastructure, a basic managed operations layer, and a credit pool for BTP and AI consumption into one subscription. On premise S/4HANA is the application license and the maintenance, with the customer running the basis layer and procuring its own cloud infrastructure.
The honest difference is the operating model and the contract surface, not the application itself.
RISE introduces the heaviest lock in of the three paths. The contract surface covers application, infrastructure, operations, and data egress, and the customer cannot unbundle parts at renewal without renegotiating the whole.
The largest exit risks are the data egress window, the FUE conversion ratio back to on premise licenses, and the rights to keep running on the underlying hyperscaler if the RISE contract ends. These are negotiable up front and very hard to recover later.
Run all three on the same scope and the same five year horizon, then read the cost, the lock in, and the operating model side by side.
The right answer depends on the estate's customization depth, the maturity of the basis team, the existence of an enterprise hyperscaler commitment, and the buyer's tolerance for vendor managed operations. Buyers who short circuit this by accepting the first RISE quote almost always overpay against their on premise alternative.
RISE delivers a managed S/4HANA, which is real value when the operating model is the gap the customer wants to close. It does not deliver the application modernization on its own, because S/4HANA on premise runs the same code line.
The modernization that matters, Clean Core remediation and adoption of the new process model, is paid for separately on either path. Treating RISE as the modernization line item is the most common pricing error in the deals we have reviewed.
Yes, and many large buyers do. SAP supports phased adoption across regions, business units, or workloads, with a hybrid period where ECC, S/4HANA on premise, and RISE coexist. The trade off is that the bundle premium runs on the migrated parts while the on premise base still carries its own cost.
A staged plan needs to model the cross over point honestly, not assume it arrives a year earlier than it actually does.
Eighteen to twenty four months before the ECC end of standard support is the band that produces the best outcomes in our panel.
That window gives finance the time to model all three paths, IT the time to assess customization depth, and procurement the time to negotiate either RISE or on premise against a credible alternative.
Buyers who start inside twelve months almost always end up paying the RISE opening ask, because the timeline itself becomes the vendor's strongest lever.
The five year cost model across stay on ECC, S/4HANA on premise, and RISE with SAP. The Clean Core remediation sizing inputs. The RISE exit and FUE conversion clause checklist. The ECC extended maintenance reading.
Used across more than sixty SAP path decisions. Independent. Buyer side. Built for finance and IT leaders running the next SAP decision cycle.
RISE is the path of least resistance. It is rarely the path of least cost. The buyer who knows the difference is the buyer who keeps the choice open.
