What is RISE with SAP? A Primer on SAP’s Business Transformation as a Service Offering

What is RISE with SAP?

Agility and continuous innovation are two key pillars of a modern business. And SAP, in its bid to fulfill the business transformation needs of its customers and accelerate their journey towards intelligent enterprise, came up with a unique offering—SAP RISE with SAP. Launched in January 2021, SAP RISE with SAP is the ERP giant’s latest subscription-based offering that bundles existing SAP tools, technologies and intelligence into a holistic Business Transformation as a Service model.

What is Business Transformation as a Service?

As rightly stated by Christian Klein, while breaking the news to the world in this press release, businesses often get stuck in their  digital business transformation journeys as it heavily focuses on tools over outcomes. While technology is a vital component of any transformation, it shall not be the primary driver.

Digital business transformation SAP offers a better, holistic approach as it focuses on revolutionizing how a business operates, taking into account both goals and outcomes. In a nutshell, Business Transformation as a Service (BTaaS) is a result-oriented model that determines realistic goals, maps out processes and workflows, establishes a clear baseline for business data, offers the right tools, builds and deploys necessary solutions, and once the new processes and solutions go live, continuously optimize the same based on feedback as well as performance.

What’s included in RISE with SAP?

Now, as the concepts behind the SAP RISE program and Business Transformation as a Service are clear, let’s take a closer look at what’s there for you in this concierge service offering:

The bundle includes five key components and a few optional components under One Offer, One Contract, saving enterprises from the hassle of managing multiple contracts. Here’s a further breakdown of this phrase coined by SAP.

One offer: A single price for all bundled components
One contract: A single contract to manage multiple SLAs, operations and issue management

In our opinion, this ‘One offer, one contract’ will particularly benefit SMBs who have comparatively smaller IT footprints, digital business transformation SAP budgets or skillset. This flexible and highly customizable offering allows them to move to SAP without burning a hole in their account.

This single contract will guide them through their digital business transformation SAP journey while also giving them access to the SAP partner ecosystem.

1. SAP S/4HANA Cloud

The modular cloud ERP solution of integrated business applications is at the core of this offering. Designed to seamlessly convert legacy ERP to the cloud version, this suite features built-in AI, ML, advanced analytics, and other next-gen intelligent technologies. Deployable on any cloud of choice, public or private.

2. SAP Business Technology Platform

The technological foundation to support the intelligent enterprise journey, the SAP BTP brings together all the tools and applications into one SAP business transformation platform along with CPEA credits to ensure innovation, agility and business value.

3. Business Process Intelligence    

This real-time guardian constitutes an integral part of the offering as it supports end-to-end process mining and enables insights-driven changes through a range of capabilities and solutions.

4. SAP Business Network Starter Pack

SAP’s intelligent networking tool supports the transformation journey by leveraging real-time insights, data visibility, analytics and shared knowledge across the partner ecosystem.

5. Tools and Services

A bundle of embedded tools and services starting from analytics, lifecycle management to SAP Readiness Check, business scenario planning and custom code migration applications to facilitate the transition.

Different paths for different customers with different starting points

One may ask, who is this bundled offering for? Primarily, the SAP RISE program is for those existing customers who wish to move to SAP Cloud ERP or SAP S/4HANA Cloud on a subscription-based licensing and, at the same time, looking forward to optimizing their business processes.

It is also for those who aim to unlock the benefits of RPA or business process intelligence for a smarter tomorrow. Moreover, this offering has been designed keeping in mind those who need to integrate data between their hybrid cloud environments.

But, as different SAP customers are at different starting points, SAP has built different roads for each of them. Here are the three main types of businesses the SAP RISE program is intended for and the different roads ahead for them:

1. Early Adopters

The existing SAP ECC users or “SAP installed base" customers who can further be classified into big ERP and small ERP users depending on the number of critical systems running within the ERP.

2. New Entrants

Non-ECC users or ‘net new space’ customers who wish to leverage S/4HANA Cloud Private Edition.

3. Digital Innovators

Customers who plan to deploy their S/4HANA Cloud on any of the hyperscalers - AWS, Microsoft Azure or Google Cloud.

That’s all for today. In our next blog posts, we will dig deeper into the other key aspects of SAP RISE with SAP, such as what are the benefits of RISE with SAP, how to know it’s right for your business, what SAP’s approach means for your business, the numerous benefits of SAP business transformation platform, and more. So stay tuned and keep coming back for more updates on this unique and intriguing offering from SAP.