SAP’s direct-to-business sales strategy is causing friction with IT teams
SAP is pushing hard to scale its cloud business, and that’s clear in how it’s selling Rise, its bundled cloud ERP solution. Instead of going through traditional IT and ERP leaders, SAP is taking the offer straight to the top, directly to business executives. It’s a bold move that’s designed to close deals faster. And it works, in the short term.
But here’s where things get messy. When sales bypass IT leaders, your organization risks implementing core systems without the right technical checks. Gartner has seen a pattern: businesses commit to Rise based on executive-level promises before fully evaluating how the system fits into their existing tech architecture. The result? Your IT team inherits a contract and a platform they didn’t shape, one that can be hard to integrate or scale without significant rework.
For C-suite leaders, it’s a question of alignment versus acceleration. Yes, bypassing IT can speed up decision-making, but you sacrifice long-term performance for short-term momentum. These misalignments surface later, as bottlenecks, integration delays, and unexpected costs. When your core systems aren’t grounded in the operational realities your tech leaders manage every day, you’re adding friction where you need flow.
Good leadership means more than making big calls quickly, it means making the right big calls with the right people in the room. The solution isn’t to slow down, but to bring technical and business leadership to the same table, early. If you’re evaluating Rise, include your IT leads from day one. You’ll make faster progress in the long term by reducing the gap between vision and execution.
SAP’s ambition to limit ERP customization through rise prioritizes streamlined upgrades over flexibility
SAP wants to simplify things. With Rise, it’s trimming down customization in its core ERP, S/4HANA. On the surface, that’s smart. Fewer complex modifications lead to faster, cheaper upgrades. It’s easier to innovate in a clean, controlled environment. That’s the pitch.
But the reality for many businesses doesn’t line up with that simplicity. Most companies operate with unique workflows, regulatory demands, and system dependencies. ERP customization has value. It’s how you adapt core systems to real-world operations. Cutting that out can mean forcing your teams to adjust their processes to fit the software, instead of the software adapting to your business.
What SAP is offering works if your business fits the template. If not, the tradeoff from agility to uniformity could cost more in time and resources than it saves during implementation. Executive teams need to assess this upfront. How much flexibility are you giving up, and what will it take to bridge the gaps?
The simplified model SAP is driving is designed for a cloud-first world. That’s the future. But the path to get there isn’t one-size-fits-all. Especially for large or heavily regulated enterprises, the cost of retrofitting internal operations to meet software limitations can undermine your progress.
You’re changing the foundation your business runs on. If you’re moving forward with Rise, make sure your operations team, and your IT leadership, understand exactly how much flexibility they’re yielding. And be ready with a strategy to fill those gaps, either with third-party tools or system integrators who can customize around the standardized core.
Limited cloud region availability of the business transformation platform (BTP) introduces technical and compliance concerns
SAP’s Business Transformation Platform (BTP), part of the Rise bundle, is designed to move data and processes across your organization’s landscape. But there’s a gap between ambition and availability. Currently, BTP is only operable in a limited number of cloud regions.
If your operations span several regions or are subject to national data residency laws, this limited availability can be a problem. It may introduce latency in global deployments and raise compliance issues related to data sovereignty in stricter jurisdictions. These aren’t minor obstacles. Failing to comply with local data laws can mean legal exposure and blocked business operations. Even when legal hurdles are cleared, performance suffers when systems aren’t deployed geographically close to operations.
Technically, businesses also face unpredictable egress and integration costs. Moving data in and out of SAP’s platform, especially when it’s located in a distant region, adds latency but also cost. If your data pipelines involve non-SAP systems or external cloud platforms, it can get expensive to run day-to-day operations due to transfer fees and infrastructure adjustments.
For executives, it’s critical to evaluate where your business operates and where your core systems live. Before negotiating any long-term contract, assess the regional availability of BTP and how it fits your compliance profile. Also calculate the real, ongoing cost of securely and efficiently moving your data, because it doesn’t stop at implementation.
Rise is central to SAP’s long-term cloud revenue strategy and growth outlook
SAP isn’t just selling a cloud product. It’s reshaping how it does business. The company is moving aggressively toward a recurring revenue model, and Rise is the engine behind that movement. It’s a packaged offering that includes S/4HANA and the Business Transformation Platform, structured as a managed service with AI tools designed to accelerate value creation and reduce implementation time.
The company recently reported a 26% year-over-year increase in cloud revenue, hitting $5 billion in a single quarter. SAP CEO Christian Klein made it clear: cloud migration is a core pillar of the company’s financial strategy moving forward. Rise allows SAP to bundle essential services and lock customers into a long-term subscription model, leading to predictable, recurring revenue.
For enterprise leaders, the shift to Rise has broad implications. You’re not just buying services, you’re aligning your tech stack with SAP’s product roadmap. This means faster deployments, access to AI and automation tools, and streamlined operational updates. But it also means deeper vendor lock-in and less control over customization.
What’s important now is to understand that SAP is fully committed to this model, and they’re investing in AI and efficiency tools that are only accessible through Rise. If your business plans to stay within the SAP ecosystem, this is where future innovation will be delivered. Make sure your internal capabilities are ready for a fully managed service model. And understand what control, flexibility, and cost predictability will look like under this new arrangement.
Discount incentives for upgrading to rise have met mixed reactions from the user community
SAP is currently offering a 50% discount to help encourage existing customers to migrate to Rise. It’s a direct move to increase adoption and fast-track organizations into its cloud-first ecosystem. This incentive caught the attention of many, including DSAG, the German-speaking SAP user group. They welcomed the price cut as a practical step toward easing the financial burden of migration.
But there’s more behind this story. DSAG had previously criticized SAP for making some of its key innovations, like artificial intelligence capabilities and green ledger technology, available only to Rise customers. In their view, gating innovation this way placed existing customers at a disadvantage and added pressure to migrate, not out of strategy, but necessity.
For executive teams, the discount should prompt a deeper evaluation. Savings upfront don’t always translate into overall value long term. If the key differentiators of SAP’s future roadmap are locked into Rise, then migration might seem inevitable. But the structure of that transition, timing, readiness, systems integration, still needs to fit your enterprise lifecycle.
Take advantage of the discount, but don’t let it replace due diligence. Consider what this migration gives you access to, and what it limits. The true cost goes far beyond the list price, especially if you’re forced to overhaul mature custom processes to fit a more standardized model.
Insufficient due diligence during rise adoption often leads to implementation challenges
Organizations are under pressure to innovate fast. That’s understandable. But skipping foundational steps to get there invites risk. Gartner is now tracking a pattern where key decisions around SAP Rise adoption are happening at the executive level, with contracts signed before IT leaders have fully reviewed technical compatibility, infrastructure readiness, or long-term support implications.
This sets up friction, business leadership issues directives that IT has to execute, often without a platform that was vetted or aligned with existing systems. The result is friction between intent and implementation. This can lead to cost overruns, extended deployment timelines, and operational instability in already complex environments.
Due diligence matters, and in the case of Rise, it’s essential. The platform includes multiple moving parts: S/4HANA, the Business Transformation Platform, and managed services. Each of these requires careful integration into your full enterprise landscape. Your IT teams need time to evaluate system dependencies, infrastructure demand, and data flow patterns before anything is signed or deployed.
Executives should be leading this evaluation, not deferring it. Put IT, procurement, operations, and strategy in the same conversation early. Conduct cost modeling. Evaluate lock-in factors. Understand your SLAs. That’s how you avoid painful adjustments later, when you’re already committed.
The rigid, non-negotiable service delivery model of rise hampers customization and customer flexibility
SAP’s Rise offering comes as a managed service. For companies that want a tightly packaged experience, this structure can save time. But for enterprises that need control over how services are deployed, SAP’s delivery model is limiting. Rise separates responsibilities in a fixed way, these roles aren’t easily adjusted. Unlike traditional managed service providers that adapt to customer needs, SAP enforces a narrow delivery framework with little room for negotiation.
That rigidity can slow down problem-solving and make it harder to localize solutions. If you need to adjust a support structure, reassign tasks, or expand operational access, you may quickly run into constraints. These limitations show up most clearly when unique processes need hands-on management, or when legal, compliance, or governance standards demand specific handling.
Gartner recommends working with a system integrator (SI) to help bridge these gaps. A strong SI brings in experienced professionals, like SAP Basis administrators and service managers, who know how to work within SAP’s structure without getting blocked by it. But relying 100% on outside partners introduces a different risk: long-term vendor lock-in. Keeping part of your SAP skills in-house ensures you can act quickly when priorities shift, or when external partners become misaligned with internal needs.
Executives should evaluate this part of the Rise model with eyes wide open. Standardization has benefits, but it also comes with trade-offs. Know which parts of your business need flexibility, and whether the Rise model allows it. Make sure your internal and external teams are structured to manage risks and cover operational gaps.
The standard service-level agreement (SLA) for rise underperforms compared to traditional managed services
When you choose a managed service, uptime matters. SAP offers a 99.7% SLA with Rise. At first glance, this meets the threshold for an enterprise-grade platform. But when you look closer, that service level translates to a monthly downtime allowance of a little over two hours. For mission-critical environments, especially in industries that operate 24/7, this isn’t always acceptable.
In comparison, many third-party managed service providers offer 99.9% uptime as a baseline. That means less downtime and, in practical terms, greater operational stability. If your organization demands higher availability under Rise, you’ll have to pay extra, this isn’t included by default. That adds not just cost, but more negotiation points into your contract that need to be clearly defined and measurable.
This gap between the standard SLA and industry expectation won’t affect every business the same way. But for companies with markets in real-time response applications, like finance, healthcare, or logistics, the difference in downtime can lead to real losses. Executives focused on resilience and risk reduction should factor this into procurement discussions.
Understand what your team needs, what’s being offered, and how much additional availability costs. Then map that against core operations. Don’t assume SLAs are uniform across vendors. They aren’t, and the difference can become measurable very quickly if something goes wrong.
Data integration between rise and other enterprise systems entails hidden costs and complex technical challenges
Data movement is operationally unavoidable. SAP Rise handles workloads inside its managed cloud, but most enterprise environments rely on a broader ecosystem, multiple platforms, hybrid clouds, and legacy applications. Pulling data into and out of the Rise environment introduces technical friction. There are hard costs attached.
Every time data moves in (ingress) or out (egress), associated fees can apply. These may seem marginal on paper, but at enterprise scale, involving frequent transfers between platforms, analytics tools, or customer-facing systems, the numbers add up fast. Gartner points to these data transfer fees as one of the hidden costs of Rise adoption, especially when enhanced cloud networking infrastructure is required, such as transit gateways or virtual private networks.
Technically, this complexity also creates potential bottlenecks. If your system requires real-time data flow between SAP and non-SAP platforms, delays caused by architectural constraints or bandwidth restrictions can disrupt workflows that support decision-making, customer service, or supply chain execution. These aren’t hypothetical risks, they’re cited by customers that have deployed Rise and run into unexpected integration strain.
Executives evaluating Rise need to take a full-infrastructure view. Your cost models should include not only the licensing and service fees, but also the ongoing cost of running data across this managed boundary. Review architecture diagrams. Assess bandwidth needs. Conduct load testing simulations if needed. And validate that any supplementary services required to establish secure, performant pipelines are clearly itemized in your implementation roadmap.
This isn’t a reason to avoid Rise. But it is a reason to evaluate the full picture of integration complexity, particularly if your IT environment is distributed, interconnected, or compliance-heavy.
Final thoughts
SAP’s Rise initiative reflects a broader shift in enterprise tech, moving fast, simplifying delivery, and locking into long-term cloud economics. It’s a model built for scale, recurring revenue, and centralized control. For SAP, it’s working. For customers, it depends on how well they prepare.
The success of a Rise deployment isn’t defined by the pitch, it’s defined by execution. That requires alignment across business and IT leadership from the start. It means asking hard questions early, digging into service levels, integration costs, customisation limits, and delivery structures. And it means recognizing that speed without strategy leads to friction, not transformation.
Good decisions here aren’t just technical, they’re structural, financial, and organizational. If you’re in the C-suite, your job is to make sure the transformation you’re buying actually fits the business you’re running. Because once you’re in, reversing direction comes at a high cost.
SAP is betting big on Rise. That doesn’t mean you should rush in. It means you should lead with clarity.
