SAP RISE Private Cloud Edition– Is it driveaway, no more to pay?

With SAP customers moving off ECC onto S/4 HANA Cloud over the next few years decisions will be made about the flavour of S/4 HANA - RISE Public or Private Cloud, or S/4 HANA on-premises. Since I’ve not heard of many established SAP customers contemplating RISE Public Cloud it’s safe to assume it will be a question of the RISE Private Cloud subscription offering or one’s own on-premises application.

Once one gets over the ‘do I want to trust all this to SAP’ question, which is an entirely different discussion, the RISE offering looks very attractive. It is sort of a ‘driveaway, no more to pay’ kind of deal—or is it? To understand this, one needs to look closely at the details; after all, the devil is in the details.

Fortunately, the SAP document ROLES AND RESPONSIBILITIES ("R&R") provides an insider's view of the details. RISE with SAP S/4HANA Cloud, private edition, and SAP ERP, tailored option.

This article is based on the 58-page, 1,100-line item, July 2024 version v.7-2024v2.

Services offered under a RISE contract.

A RISE contract offers 4 types of services and specifies a range of excluded services (Excluded Tasks).

• Standard Services,
• Optional Services,
• Additional Services, and
• SAP Cloud Application Services.

Standard Services

There are currently 487 services that come with every RISE contract as standard. These are the services performed by SAP or the partner managing the RISE contract to set up the systems and then to manage ongoing. There is no option for customer involvement in these services, some of which include:

• Managing the data centre
• Hardware operations monitoring
• Operating system management including system start-up and shutdown
• Most database management tasks

Optional Services:

Optional Services are an additional 81 tasks or services that are not covered in the Standard Services or by any Cloud Application Services. These tasks/services must be specifically contracted for and itemized in the customer’s contract or requested as needed via an authorized change request. These also incur additional fees and can only be performed by SAP or the partner managing the RISE contract.

Several examples include:

• Scaling compute and/or storage capacity
• High availability set up
• Homogenous system copies of some systems
• System performance and benchmarking

Additional Services

There are 57 one-off tasks or services that the customer can request on an as-needed basis. They, too, can only be performed by SAP or the partner managing the RISE contract. These should be put in your contract along with the fee for each—they will not be performed unless requested.

Several examples include:

• On-demand back-ups
• Service request acceleration
• System copies beyond the contracted number
• System refresh for certain applications

SAP Cloud Application Services (CAS)

There are an additional 318 services that can be included in the agreement and will be performed by SAP or the partner managing the RISE contract. Of course, there is an additional fee for each SAP CAS provided. However, unlike Additional or Optional Services, customers can perform these services themselves.

• Several examples of these include:
• Almost all SAP BTP tasks and activities
• Almost all SAP Solution Manager set-up and configuration activities
• Archiving
• Most Fiori App activities

Excluded Tasks

There are 193 listed excluded tasks/services that can only be performed by the customer. They are not available as Optional Services, Additional Services, or Cloud Application Services.

These are areas that must be maintained by the customer’s own SAP team. Neither SAP nor the partner managing the RISE contract will perform these types of tasks.

Several areas include:

• Validation of backed-up or restored data
• Post-restore task checking and connection of custom applications
• Develop and maintain disaster recovery procedures for those areas and aspects of the service which are customer's responsibility
• Testing and acceptance of object changes
• Configuration - Fiori applications

Drive away, and no more to pay?

In reading through SAP’s Roles and Responsibilities document it becomes clear that unless carefully negotiated, it is by no means a drive away with no more to pay contract.

Given the number of Optional and Additional Services listed, it is unlikely that everything that might be needed, either regularly or from time to time, will be itemized in a fully costed agreement, especially for SAP customers who have negotiated their agreement without experienced technical input.

Beware of the low-balled price. Variations to any agreement are expensive and relied upon by suppliers to get their full value out of a contract. Perhaps it's a bit like booking a budget flight. It's better to include the extra baggage up-front while you can rather than pay the much higher, unexpected fee later.