Since SAP RISE came to the market, it seems that SAP’s goal is to force organizations into a relatively unproven and inflexible RISE model. To do so, they are obfuscating reality, limiting transparency, and changing their historic business practices to make RISE appear financially superior to the traditional perpetual license models.
Because of the way SAP is positioning RISE in the market, organizations must also re-evaluate their cloud strategy. In addition to determining their long-term infrastructure support strategy for SAP, organizations are also likely to be moving SAP workloads to the cloud, retiring certain applications, or determining which applications should remain on premises or in a hosted environment.
This would entail an evaluation of hyperscalers Amazon Web Services (AWS), Google Cloud Platform (GCP), and Microsoft Azure, as well as the possible undertaking of a multicloud strategy, a preferred/challenger vendor model, and an approach to addressing the short- and long-term requirements of these relationships.
Organizations should engage the hyperscaler market alongside their evaluations of RISE to re-establish control, optimize negotiation leverage, and expose the gaps in SAP’s RISE marketing material. There are three primary benefits to engaging AWS, GCP, or Azure in parallel with your RISE evaluation.
Cost advantages
When it comes to hyperscaler consumption, the infrastructure architecture — and how it leverages certain compute resources — matters immensely. This is true regardless of whether you are going directly to the hyperscaler or are receiving support through RISE. In addition, your ability to commit to certain workload levels over time can substantially change your investment profile.
