Full narration of the briefing. Click a section heading to jump the player to that moment.
RISE is sold as one bundle covering software, infrastructure and managed services, and that framing is convenient for the seller and risky for the buyer. The base fee is real. It is not the whole cost. Across roughly forty to fifty RISE deals we reviewed or negotiated, the gap between the quoted base fee and the year three run rate averaged fifteen to thirty percent.
Nothing in that gap is secret. Every item is nameable, and every item can be capped before signature and essentially none of them after it. Claire and I are going to name all of them, because the ones you have not named are the ones that arrive.
Start by breaking the number apart. Five components sit inside that single figure. The core subscription, priced on the blended user metric. The platform credit pool for extensions and integration.
The infrastructure layer, the hyperscaler compute, storage and network. The managed services layer, operations and upgrades. And the legacy maintenance bridge covering what you are still running while you migrate. They behave completely differently under pressure.
The subscription moves on the count more than the rate. The credit pool triples on evidence. The infrastructure line moves with your disaster recovery posture. Managed services move on scope but hardly at all on price.
And that is why the four line breakdown is the ask, not the discount. Here is a useful detail. The FUE rate holds constant across AWS, Azure and Google Cloud, while the infrastructure line changes, and disaster recovery posture alone moves it thirty to sixty percent. So a blended number tells you nothing about which lever to pull, and comparing two blended numbers from two hyperscalers tells you less than nothing.
Demand the four line breakdown with its own list price and its own discount percentage against each line, before you compare anything. A single blended figure is designed to hide where the margin actually sits.
Then the exclusions, because the bundle excludes far more than buyers assume. SuccessFactors, Concur, the advanced Ariba capabilities, Commerce Cloud, and country payroll all license separately. If your business case counted any of those as included, it is wrong by whatever they cost. And this is a very easy error to make honestly: the word RISE gets used loosely in presentations to mean the whole SAP relationship, while on the order form it means a specific set of components.
Take your application inventory, mark every item against the actual order form line that covers it, and price the gaps before you compare totals.
Four more sit just outside the fee and compound every year. FUE drift, which inflates every annual invoice once usage grows past the signed count. Premium support tiers, because the base tier carries standard support and faster response is a paid upgrade. Compute and storage overage, and in roughly half the deals we saw those were oversized at signing, which creates recurring cost rather than saving it.
And exit assistance, which is a fee unless the contract prices data export and transition help in advance. That last one belongs in session ten, because it is not really a cost line. It is the price of the door.
And one more pattern, because it looks like generosity. We can include this at no additional cost is not a discount. It is a future renewal liability at full uplift, and it enlarges the base you will be repriced against later. Every module accepted for free in year one is a module you pay full price on in year six, and it also grows the number the annual escalator is applied to in between.
So price the gift. Ask what it lists at, ask what it renews at, and ask to have it removed if you do not want it. Scope that arrives free is scope the account team is paid to place, which tells you what it is worth to them.
Here is the move. Refuse to evaluate a blended number. Ask for the four line breakdown, each with its own list price and its own discount, plus a written list of what is excluded and what each exclusion costs. That is not an aggressive request and it is very rarely refused, because it is a request for information rather than for money.
Then add the year three run rate beside the year one figure on the same page. Next time, Tom and Claire take the exposure that most buyers believe the move removes, and that in fact travels straight across with you.
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