RISE with SAP

Many customers and partners - in fact the entire SAP ecosystem - are currently concerned with SAP's RISE initiative. This blog article is intended to provide an overview of how and at what levels Arvato Systems is dealing with RISE as a business partner of SAP, but also in its customer role (Bertelsmann).

SAP surprised the 2021 SAP market with a stellar launch, pronouncing a new bundled product and service offering to its customers with a focus on its  S/4HANA ERP cloud products.

Whereas up to now SAP customers have had to purchase various SAP products and services individually as part of the transformation and digitization of their ERP processes, with RISE SAP offers a comprehensive package consisting, among other things, of a suitable S/4HANA cloud ERP system (public cloud or private cloud edition), tools for process analysis, migration tools and procedure models, as well as a credit for the consumption of further cloud or business services. Thus, the relocation of on-premise SAP ERP installations to the cloud is a core element of RISE.

Arvato Systems has been an SAP partner for many years and is currently active in the following partner roles in the SAP Ecosystem: PE Sell (SAP license reseller), PE Service (implementation partner with a focus on S/4HANA Finance, Logistics and CX as well as for the Retail & Consumer Goods, SPMT & PLI industries), PE Build (IP, SaaS business models in the SAP Ecosystem) and SAP Hosting Partner (with a focus on SAP on Cloud models with the three hyperscalers AWS, Azure and the Google Cloud).

As a long-standing SAP partner, our focus is clearly on the added value and offering with which we explain and provide RISE to our customers. Accordingly, we immediately started the so-called partner enablement on all levels provided by SAP and are currently certified as an SAP RISE partner for the Public and Private Cloud Edition as well as for the Cloud AMS Services, for which SAP also provides a dedicated partner certification. We have already come into contact with all of these topics in previous projects, so we are not breaking new ground anywhere. The new certification standard is to be obtained quickly for addressing customers and dealing with SAP partner management.

While we knew from initial exchange rounds with SAP from the emergence of RISE rather a focus on SAP new customers and rather small to medium-complex SAP landscapes, we are currently watching with great interest the efforts of SAP to address with RISE in particular also existing customers with large SAP installations and thus to position the S/4HANA Private Cloud Edition as an ERP cloud solution.

With its content, RISE addresses essential questions and topics that play an important role in the digitization of business processes and models, as well as the modernization of our customers' IT architectures. The evaluation of RISE in comparison to our own transformation models and an integration into our consulting approach will be part of our activities in the coming weeks. As a digitization and transformation partner and SAP partner, we now need to see how our customers evaluate the SAP offering, the necessary realignment to cloud subscriptions, and the implications for their existing digitization strategies. To this end, we look forward to the discussions ahead and to working with all stakeholders: our customers and the SAP contacts involved.

Arvato Systems views RISE with SAP from two points of view: Firstly, as a long-standing SAP partner to our external customers, and secondly, from our internal role in the Bertelsmann Group with its diverse SAP applications, which we support holistically from licenses through implementation and operation to AMS.
 

This means that we always deal with issues from a consulting / partner perspective, but also from a customer perspective - also in the case of RISE with SAP. Initial reviews of the SAP RISE offering for our PCoE customers as well as for our own Bertelsmann concerns still raise a number of questions that need to be analyzed and evaluated in more detail:

• How can RISE offerings be leveraged when large and heterogeneous license inventories of user and engine licenses are on customers' books?
• How can SAP cloud target architectures be implemented contractually if a large number of ECC/onPrem systems also still have to be maintained at the same time over a longer period of time?
• With what investment protection can SAP customers turn to SAP's new cloud offerings?

These are only the first focal points for which we are currently examining and questioning SAP's RISE offering with our customer understanding and also discussing it intensively with SAP. Others will follow and we expect SAP to further develop and detail the current market offering.
 

In this process, it is very important for Arvato Systems to work with our customers to identify the relevant aspects and jointly arrive at a secure understanding and, if necessary, a mediated offer by SAP. In this process, as usual as an SAP partner, we support our customers in identifying and negotiating the best possible service and product offer from SAP. We are therefore looking for an exchange with our customers on RISE and, in addition to all the bilateral discussions already underway, we are also looking forward to receiving new inquiries at sap-solutions@bertelsmann.de.

SAP's new business model has the potential to shift market structures in the SAP ecosystem. From an SAP hosting partner perspective, we are currently intensively examining the impact of the SAP RISE partnership with the three hyperscalers aws, Azure, and Google on our own partner business with precisely these hyperscalers. While challenges in our existing business models are more likely to emerge here for us, we see good opportunities to distinguish ourselves as an implementation and AMS service partner for RISE customers.