RISE with SAP: SAP Launches New Offering to Accelerate, Simplify Digital Transformation

The business world’s shift to the cloud was already well underway by the time COVID-19 started to spread around the globe in March 2020.

Today, nearly a year later, that shift has turned into a race: An IDC report indicates that by the end of 2021, 80% of enterprises will adopt cloud-centric infrastructure and applications twice as fast as before the pandemic. As the world now sets its sights on the “next normal,” organizations are realizing that they need to modernize fast—or risk extinction altogether.

However, for many businesses, the upfront costs, skilled resources, complexity and hefty time commitment required for a full-scale digital transformation—including migrating from their present enterprise resource planning (ERP) system—remain prohibitive.

This is one of many reasons why the German technology giant SAP has unveiled its latest offering, RISE with SAP—a new solution designed to help companies navigate their respective digital transformations by combining everything they might need in a highly-customizable “as-a-service” model.

“Geopolitical tensions, environmental challenges, and the ongoing pandemic are forcing businesses to deal with change faster than ever before,” said Christian Klein, chief executive officer of SAP, in a recent press release. “Companies that can adapt their business processes quickly will thrive—and SAP can help them achieve this. This is what RISE with SAP is all about: it helps customers continuously unlock new ways of running businesses in the cloud to stay ahead of their industry.”

What is RISE with SAP?

One of the primary goals of RISE with SAP is to make it easier for customers with complex on-premises, legacy ERP systems to implement the modern, cloud-based S/4HANA. To do this, RISE features one responsible party for service-level agreements, operations and support—all bundled together into a simple subscription model. RISE also guarantees customers choice, giving them the flexibility to choose both their cloud provider and managed services provider (MSP)—all while maintaining SAP as the single point of contact. Together, these elements of RISE help businesses holistically transform on their terms and their own timeline, regardless of their starting point or complexity.

For SAP, this is also a critical step to achieving the much bigger goal of helping its customers become an intelligent enterprise, which leverages a cloud-based ERP (i.e. S/4HANA) and next-generation technology to become more flexible, resilient, innovative and data-driven. RISE was designed to simplify and accelerate that journey through three core components:

Business Process Intelligence: Leveraging best practices, SAP enables customers to continually analyze their business processes, benchmark them against industry standards and provide tailored recommendations on how to adopt new business models and automate and standardize processes. 

Implementation and Migration: These are separately contracted services, generally with certified partners, to implement S/4HANA or migrate to S/4HANA. SAP offers choice in that organizations adopting RISE can not only choose their services partner, but they can also choose to adopt a standardized version of SAP that follows best practices or adopt a tailored solution. Previous offers in the cloud provided limited options for organizations requiring a Brownfield implementation approach to S/4HANA. RISE, however, recognizes that customers have varying departure points and supports a Brownfield approach to adopting S/4HANA.

Creating an Intelligent Enterprise: RISE also leverages the SAP Business Technology Platform—the foundation of the intelligent enterprise. With it, customers and partners can quickly develop innovations to easily complement their SAP solution, thanks to one shared semantical data model. To accelerate the adoption of the Intelligent Enterprise, the RISE offering includes pre-packaged solutions from an SAP Business Network Starter Pack with inclusions of popular functionality like Ariba.

What Does This Mean for SAP’s Partner Ecosystem?

With RISE, SAP is creating an awakening in the market that will drive more existing SAP customers to adopt S/4HANA in the cloud. This puts Navisite in a strong position to help its customers and the market navigate their digital transformations with SAP. Navisite recently announced the acquisition of Dickinson + Associates, a premier SAP Gold Partner with over 22 years of experience as a leading SAP systems integrator. Now, with the acquisition of Velocity Technology Solutions, Navisite can deliver a complete scope of SAP solutions, including SAP licensing, S/4HANA implementation services, technical and functional consulting and application managed services to help customers adopt SAP cloud technologies and move to S/4HANA efficiently.

Customers looking to adopt S/4HANA with a subscription model funded by operating budgets—not large capital investments—now have more choice than before on how to adopt S/4HANA and who to partner with on that journey. Navisite’s experience in solving business problems with SAP, both on the front end of adoption with our professional services and on the back end with managed services, is a compelling option for organizations. Navisite helps customers navigate the now to achieve the most from their SAP license investment. 

Charting your path to the SAP Intelligent Enterprise means working with people who have the business experience and SAP knowledge to help you accelerate digital transformation while improving business performance and outcomes. Learn more about Navisite’s end-to-end SAP capabilities.