Full narration of the briefing. Click a section heading to jump the player to that moment.
If you are on ECC, or on S/4HANA on your own infrastructure, someone has almost certainly put RISE with SAP in front of you. And the way it arrives is as a technical programme: a migration, a modernisation, a move to cloud. I want to reframe that in the first sixty seconds of this series, because the framing decides how well you do. This is a contract decision wearing a technical hat.
The migration is real work, but the money and the risk are set by the paper, and the paper is signed long before anybody moves a system. Claire and I are going to spend this session on what you are actually being sold.
So let us be precise. RISE with SAP is a commercial wrapper. It bundles S/4HANA Cloud, private edition in most enterprise cases, together with the hyperscaler infrastructure underneath it and a base layer of run services, into one subscription. And that subscription is priced on Full Use Equivalents rather than on the named user categories your current contract uses.
Notice what just happened in that sentence. Your software licence, your hosting and your operations, which today sit in three separate places with three separate negotiations, become one number with one renewal date. That consolidation is the product. It is also the thing that removes most of your future leverage.
Now the sentence I would put on the wall. RISE changes who runs your SAP platform. It does not change who carries the liability. Audit rights continue.
Indirect access exposure follows your integrations regardless of who hosts the system. Compliance for how your users are classified stays with you. That distinction matters because a great deal of the enthusiasm inside your own organisation comes from people who believe the move hands the problem to SAP. It hands over operations.
It does not hand over responsibility, and every session in this series is downstream of that one fact.
And here is the mechanic that makes this different from any other renewal you will run. When you convert, your ECC perpetual entitlement terminates at signature. There is no way back to it. You are exchanging an asset you own outright, with a maintenance stream you can shop, for a subscription you rent, on a metric the vendor defines.
That may still be the right trade for your organisation. But it is a trade, and it is permanent, and a great many conversion decisions are made by people who have never had it put to them in that language. Ask whoever is presenting the business case whether they can state what happens if you want out in year five.
I want to be fair to the product, because a series that only lists risks is not advice. RISE is a genuine win for a specific estate: one that already wanted to stop operating SAP itself, that does not have a Basis team it considers a strength, and that is willing to standardise. If you cannot run the platform well today, and the internal skills are thin, and you are prepared to give up customisation, the model does what it says. The estates it hurts are the mirror image: a strong Basis team, a good hyperscaler deal already in place, and a heavily customised ECC core.
Which of those two you are is the first thing to establish, and it is not a question the account team should answer for you.
The bill is decided by two numbers, and both are set at signing. The first is the FUE count, which is the largest single overspend in these contracts and the subject of session four. The second is the year four renewal cap, which almost nobody negotiates because year four feels far away when you are trying to close year one. Most buyers optimise the first and never touch the second.
And the pattern across the engagement record is consistent: the buyers who did well were not the ones who argued hardest about the rate. They were the ones who fixed the count and capped the out years before anyone discussed a discount at all.
Here is the move for this session, and it takes an afternoon. Write two columns. On the left, what you hold today: the perpetual entitlement, the maintenance stream you could move to a third party, your hyperscaler agreement, your Basis capability, your custom code. On the right, what the proposal gives you: the subscription, the operations, the roadmap access.
Then price both honestly, which is session five. Do not start from the discount, because the discount is a number about their side of the trade. Next time, Daniel and I take the date everybody is reacting to, and ask whose clock is actually running.
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