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SAP's home crowd fails to RISE to the bait with lift-and-shift-to-the-cloud offer

German-speaking user group takes dismal view of scheme's value

The German-speaking SAP user group (DSAG) has published a decidedly downbeat survey revealing attitudes to RISE with SAP, the application company's big sell to get its entrenched customer base to the cloud.

In joint research with the Americas SAP User Group (ASUG), DSAG has shown only 12 per cent of its members say the RISE campaign is "somewhat of value or high in value." A significant minority of those users, 39 per cent, view RISE as having little value or no value at all.

Only 10 per cent of DSAG members said it was "somewhat to very likely" that they would consider the offer.

RISE with SAP was announced to great fanfare in January. It is part of SAP's efforts to shake off its reputation among investors as an on-premises laggard in the face of competition from SaaSy upstarts like Workday and Salesforce. It followed a reset in SAP's financial forecast which saw a 23 per cent fall in company value, and is designed to buy the business more time to get itself onto higher-margin subscription licences.

In a pre-canned statement, DSAG board member for transformation Christine Tussing said:

"SAP needs to communicate the added value of RISE with SAP and the associated transformation potential much more clearly. Only companies that recognize this value as a key component of their business transformation will make RISE with SAP a part of their future path."

It is not the first time DSAG has thrown some constrictive criticism SAP's way over the RISE offer. In June, on the eve of the company's Sapphire Now shindig, Jens Hungershausen, DSAG chairman, said the package had "yet to prove its worth in practice."

But SAP might take some comfort from users' attitudes in North America. Among ASUG members, 24 per cent saw RISE as being somewhat of value or high in value, while 37 per cent believe it is somewhat to very likely that they will consider RISE with SAP.

Outwardly at least, SAP is upbeat about RISE. In a call with investors following yesterday's second quarter results, CEO Christian Klein said the offer, which leans heavily on partnerships with big consultancies and system integrators, was one of the company's drivers for growth in the cloud. Demand for the "end-to-end business transformation offering" was strong from the installed base and from new customers, he said.

Chip giant AMD had chosen RISE to consolidate onto a single enterprise platform, for example, he said.

"Strong RISE momentum leads first to strong adoption of S/4HANA cloud and our business technology platform. And secondly, through our business technology platform, customers then adopt our integrated line of business applications. That's exactly the dynamic we saw play out this quarter," he said.

The joint DSAG/ASUG survey was based on 271 responses in North America and 172 in German-speaking countries during April and May 2021. ®

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