The "Rising Star

The XaaS world is one term richer. After on-premise came IaaS (Infrastructure as a Service), followed by PaaS (Platform as a Service) and then SaaS (Software as a Service). "Rise with SAP" is advertised as Transformation as a Service, so TaaS in a sense.

Basically a good idea. SAP bundles a number of its own products and services together with those from the partner ecosystem that contribute their own products and services. On the SAP side, these include Business Process Intelligence, SAP BTC and the S/4 Hana Cloud. This also includes the cloud infrastructure of choice (of the participating providers). Here, SAP works with the leading hyperscalers, and the customer retains a certain degree of flexibility here. In this way, SAP accepts that many customers in the real world already use existing infrastructures such as Azure, AWS, IBM Cloud or others.

So far, so simple. However, in SAP's cloud-based software stack, the customer is (still?) limited. Ariba is part of Rise, but not SuccessFactors, Concur, Fieldglass or Qualtrics, for example.

According to SAP, Rise will consist of a single offer and contract. That sounds charming, but it is aimed more at the purchasing department of Rise customers and less at IT or the business departments.

Anyone familiar with today's SAP contracts will wonder how even more disparate services can be bundled into a single contract and subscription. What will happen to licenses of parts of the solution that have already been purchased? SAP promises a highly flexible yet simple user metric. And what about the still unresolved issue of indirect licensing, which has cost a lot of trust?

In addition, SAP promises up to 20 percent lower total cost of ownership. However, these do not refer to a comparison with a non-Rise implementation, but to an on-premise implementation. So it's not a statement of whether and how Rise can be cheaper than a traditional implementation in the cloud.

In my view, the basic approach is the right one. SAP accepts that customers are going down the path of digital transformation. Regardless of whether this happens without or with SAP. With Rise, SAP is positioning itself more in the middle of the action again. Whether customers accept the offer also depends on how SAP partners will accept Rise. With the current close ties to SAP offerings, individualization is still low outside of the cloud option.

This means that both customers and partners have a high need to adapt to the conformity specified by SAP. SAP customers have so far been used to a high level of adaptation of their ERP solutions to their core processes.

The new Rise world may lead to a possible pressure for standardization. What is also not clear is the possible way back. Customers should avoid a vendor lock-in, i.e., the emergence of high switching costs or other barriers to switching, as far as possible. It would have been cool if SAP had "only" created the framework and the partners could offer a wide variety of solutions via certified Rise interfaces.

The whole thing reminds me of the comparison between Windows solutions and the Apple world. Diversity and individuality on the one hand, paid for with a bit more effort. A homogeneous (and, in Apple's case, appetizingly designed) world on the other, which works best when the customer takes everything from a single source. (Also) here the way back is, let's say, somewhat complex.

A "rising star" is still on its way up. In this respect, Rise can be a great hit if it is only at the beginning and not already at the zenith of its trajectory.

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