Full narration of the briefing. Click a section heading to jump the player to that moment.
The migration to S/4HANA is presented as one decision. It is five, and each one produces a different licence conversion line, a different cost trajectory and a different amount of leverage. Brownfield, which is a system conversion of what you already run. Greenfield, a new implementation.
Selective data transition, the hybrid. RISE private edition. And S/4HANA on your own infrastructure. Across the migration engagement record, buyers who anchored on the SAP recommended path left fifteen to twenty eight percent on the table.
Not because the recommendation is dishonest, but because it is optimised for a different objective than yours.
Take brownfield first, because it is the default and it looks the safest. A system conversion carries your existing entitlement across, and in our file that meant twenty to forty percent of legacy entitlement that no longer mapped to any active S/4HANA need. Contract conversion on the product conversion model repriced shelfware that a greenfield reset would simply have dropped. So the comfortable path has a cost, and the cost is that everything you stopped using in the last decade comes with you and gets priced into a subscription forever.
Brownfield is a technical convenience that can be a commercial mistake, and nobody flags that at the architecture review.
And there is a pattern that runs across all the RISE flavoured paths. Proposals bundled migration credits that masked a ten to twenty percent uplift on the steady state subscription. The credit is real and it is genuinely valuable, but it lands in the early years while the uplift lives in the run rate you pay for the whole term. So a path can look cheaper than another path purely because more of its cost has been pushed past the horizon of the spreadsheet you were shown.
This is why we insist on costing every path over the same period, on the same page, with the credits stripped out and shown separately.
Then, inside RISE itself, a second fork. Private edition keeps your own tenant inside a hyperscaler, with custom code, integrations and add ons supported. Public edition is multi tenant with a standard data model and no Z table customisation. Public lists twenty to thirty five percent below private per user, which is why it appears in every cost comparison.
But the cadence differs too: public takes two mandatory release cycles a year, private moves every three to five. And implementation runs four to nine months on public against nine to eighteen on private. Cheaper, faster, and far more constrained. That is a real trade, not a discount.
Which means custom code, not cost, is usually the deciding factor. A heavily customised ECC core cannot land on public edition without a clean core programme, and a clean core programme is a multi year initiative with its own budget and its own risk. So if someone is comparing public edition pricing against your current spend, the first question is whether public edition is even reachable for your estate, and by when. Industry depth points the same way: the full industry solution suite sits on private, and public coverage is narrower.
Cost is one of nine factors, and on a custom heavy estate it is not the one that decides.
One more trap, and it catches organisations with a good cloud position. If you already hold a substantial hyperscaler commitment, RISE brings its own bundled infrastructure, and unless it is handled deliberately you can pay for the same capacity twice: once inside the subscription and once against a commitment you still have to consume. The mitigation exists. RISE infrastructure spend can count toward an existing enterprise discount programme or committed spend agreement where marketplace billing is enabled.
But that has to be arranged, not assumed, and it is one of the first things to raise rather than one of the last.
Here is the move. Cost all five paths on one page before you open the SAP conversation, over the same period, with credits shown separately from run rate, and choose on total cost of ownership rather than on narrative. It is perhaps three weeks of work and it is the highest return three weeks in the whole programme, because it converts you from someone evaluating a proposal into someone comparing options. Then let the account team learn that you have done it.
Next time, Tom and Claire take the single number that decides more of this bill than any other: the FUE count.
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