How SAP tries to incite even more customers to migrate to S/4 HANA: RISE with SAP – Business Transformation as a Service

Today (January 27th), SAP has launched a new framework offering for the business transformation of its customers under the RISE branding.

From the product perspective, Rise with SAP is rather a summarization of all SAP products, capabilities, best practices, but in a more integrated manner, and cloud-enabled. In his keynote at the launch of the Rise offering, SAP CEO Christian Klein explained that customers will now get one contract, one person in charge and one price. It could be considered a step forward for SAP’s cloud transformation.

SAP goes beyond IaaS or SaaS with the concept of Business Transformation as a Service. This is supposed to be a holistic offering, leveraging all SAP assets from S/4 HANA to its platform and Business Network. RISE is built as a framework/ model in three steps, starting with Business Process Redesign, followed by the technological migration, and concluded with Build the Intelligent Enterprise.

SAP has shown that the RISE offering can be used to start a re-design of companies’ business process landscapes by analyzing user behavior, content, data by means of RPAs and AI. The service is cloud-enabled and the “as-a-service” deployment model allows customers to use capacity as needed.

A key element for future process redesign efforts of SAP clients will be the solution and services offering of Signivio. SAP has announced its intention to take over the Berlin-based company that is focused on business process redesign. Signivio maintains its own Business Transformation Suite, a cloud-based management platform, which allows clients to understand, model, optimize, analyze and manage their business processes. In the past, SAP and Signivio have already collaborated in client projects e.g. for Zalando and Siemens.

This new model will strongly enable the ecosystem for further development, while giving the customers the choice (own datacenter or hyperscalers). At the same time, the partners are encouraged to develop even more their own IP on the SAP platform, while the implementation itself will drive the C&SI services.

As a technological novelty, SAP has also announced a new step in the partnership with Microsoft, embedding teams in its products (S/4 HANA), helping the customers work more efficiently in these times of remote business/work.

Although the announcement has not concerned new products, but rather an integrated commercial offering, it is a key message for the customers: they can see SAP as a holistic partner for digital transformation, and this could drive the customers to move faster to the “new” SAP suites. Furthermore, the RISE announcement can be seen as a reaction to SAP’s client efforts, to take upcoming S/4HANA migration as an ignition to change, consolidate and redesign their business processes.