Users find RISE with SAP service levels below industry standard

Gartner also says customers say ERP vendor's internal processes cause delays

Users who signed up for the RISE with SAP deal are finding that the costs are higher than expected, and the service levels are worse, research from Gartner indicates.

SAP customers number among the global organizations that are grappling with modernizing their enterprise application portfolio while moving it to the cloud. In January 2021, SAP launched its RISE with SAP program — a commercial arrangement with the software giant fronting deals with service partner and cloud providers — in a bid to accelerate the transition.

But as RISE with SAP has developed, customers have become "unpleasantly surprised" by the technical tasks they are left with. Meanwhile, service levels are set below industry standard, and the time RISE with SAP takes to complete infrastructure tasks is delaying project launches, Gartner found.

"Clients have noted that a siloed operational approach often results in activities — such as enabling a new interface from SAP to a satellite system — requiring coordination between multiple teams within the SAP support structure and taking over a month to complete. RISE with SAP offers response level for incidents, but — unlike other managed services contracts — does not offer committed time to resolve service requests," the report said.

At the same time, the standard SLA for uptime was of 99.7 percent, below the industry standard of 99.9 percent. To get to a higher SLA, users would have to pay significantly higher fees to SAP, said Alessandro Galimberti, Gartner senior director analyst and expert in public cloud Infrastructures.

"You have an SLA, and that's great, but in the end, you make money with this system. If you're a manufacturing company and the ERP is down, your blue-collar workers can't work. If you have this kind of [SLA] setup on-prem, [it] could be acceptable: you take the risk," he told The Register.

"But on the cloud, where the hyperscaler can do unplanned maintenance if needed, this is a huge risk, and that's why we are advising that you need to at least upgrade to this architecture, but that comes at a quite expensive additional cost."

Meanwhile, SAP's approach to managing infrastructure projects has been below the expectations set by industry partners in the on-prem world.

"Customers have reported that they have seen SAP working in a very siloed environment with different teams, not [coordinating] with each other. When you need to accomplish something like deployment of the new system, there's an OS team, a cloud team, a network team, and it's complex for SAP. They are still struggling in that area. When you don't have the machine up and running, you cannot do the development, you cannot do the testing, you cannot do the whole go live," Galimberti said.

Although RISE with SAP was set up as a "one hand to shake" deal, at least on the infrastructure side, with SAP managing cloud providers and third-party partners behind the deal, Gartner advises that users hire a third party themselves to help them navigate the complexity of RISE with SAP.

The tech analyst also reported that users did not always understand the technical issues with RISE with SAP because SAP often sells to business stakeholders rather than techies.

Galimberti said RISE with SAP deals were "very rigid" and presented an architecture with a lot of limitations.

"This is probably not where you would recommend your company to go. I see many of my clients who are into the infrastructure on SAP [who] didn't want to sign, so SAP bypassed them completely [to] reach a gentleman's agreement with people who don't enter into technical details, and then used this as a top down approach, which is creating even more frustration in the organization," he said.

The Register has asked SAP to comment on the issues raised by Gartner's research.

A recent note from SAP president of customer evolution and success, said: "RISE with SAP is designed for large enterprises and corporations seeking a comprehensive transformation.

"The offering goes well beyond ERP functionality to help provide comprehensive management and optimization services as well as migration support. This robust support can enable companies to migrate their entire IT landscape to the cloud while developing new digital business models." ®