This guest perspective was authored by Josh Greenbaum, Principal at Enterprise Applications Consulting (EAC).
SAP Sapphire & ASUG Annual Conference 2025 provided a rich palette of announcements and sessions that covered a wide range of topics, and separating the wheat from the chaff is difficult. Nonetheless, several themes emerged during three hot days in Orlando that—when seen as part of a holistic, interwoven set of strategies—potentially anchor 2025 as a watershed year for SAP and its customers.
These themes center around SAP’s emerging support for the innate heterogeneity in its customer base. This recognition reached its apogee at Sapphire 2025, and with it came important changes to RISE contracting, as well as new capabilities in the RISE methodology and what SAP calls its transformation toolchain, all of which will help customers with heterogeneous landscapes move to the cloud in ways that better fit their business and technology needs.
The opportunities, and challenges, presented by the need to better support the heterogeneity of the customer base can be broken down into three themes:
- Improved support for customers’ heterogeneous environments
- Changes in RISE contracting and licensing, and a new clarity on the role of GROW
- The increasingly important role of the SAP toolchain in overall implementation success
Supporting Heterogeneity: The Two Sides of SAP’s “Suite as a Service” Message
SAP’s “Suite-as-a-Service” strategy was one of the key takeaways from Sapphire. The fact that customers, particularly ASUG members, need help managing their heterogeneous landscapes was an important part of this new strategy. SAP took a broad view of heterogeneity by explicitly adding support for hybrid on-premise and cloud landscapes to the more established concept of supporting non-SAP systems and data within an SAP landscape.
While the ultimate goal of Suite-as-a-Service may still be a wall-to-wall SAP cloud landscape, particularly for net-new or greenfield implementations, SAP made it clear that this vision also includes S/4HANA and other flagship cloud applications running side by side with non-SAP systems. With a critical caveat: S/4HANA or some other SAP cloud property needs to be present and—most importantly—the integration and orchestration of critical business processes remains the purview of SAP and BTP and doesn’t end up being managed by rivals like ServiceNow.
At Sapphire, the day-one keynote by Muhammad Alam, the SAP Executive Board Member in charge of product and engineering, directly acknowledged this reality. His keynote also showcased how SAP is both sympathetic to the challenges presented by these real-world scenarios and is actively providing a strong innovation path to the cloud.
The theme of minimizing the integration effort surfaced in myriad ways. One of the stars of Sapphire was SAP’s recently christened transformation toolchain—consisting of Cloud ALM, Signavio, LeanIX, and WalkMe—which had cameo appearances in keynotes and at sessions throughout the week. One such appearance took place during the day-two keynote by Thomas Saueressig, the SAP Executive Board member in charge of customer services and delivery. Saueressig’s keynote amplified the difficulty of supporting those complex integration scenarios—the ones that had been highlighted by Alam in his day-one keynote—by underscoring the role the toolchain can play in helping customers migrate towards clean core and away from this complexity. Saueressig, notably, also emphasized the need to curb the excess costs and waste that have historically plagued SAP implementations.
Support for heterogeneity also underscored SAP’s different pronouncements and presentations on Business Data Cloud (BDC) and the Databricks partnership. SAP’s new and growing library of Intelligent Applications, as well as Joule and other SAP AI products, will be able to use BDC and its components to consume non-SAP data, in addition to the data locked into customers’ ECC systems, significantly enhancing their prospective value. The available of what Alam called “high-quality data” is a key component of these products’ value, and he called out the opportunity for third-party data as well.
Changes in RISE and a Re-Emphasis on GROW’s Unique Role
SAP’s focus on supporting complex, integrated SAP systems can also be seen in some important changes to RISE contracting, which SAP began to highlight earlier this year. The main change to RISE has been its delineation as a contracting regime for installed-base customers, especially those with large, complex SAP landscapes. This means that SAP will allow RISE to support customers implementing S/4HANA Private Edition/Public Edition hub-and-spoke landscapes and other hybrid cloud and on-premise landscapes as well, something that previous RISE regimes discouraged.
SAP also used Sapphire to refocus its efforts on public cloud adoption as it continues to push GROW and S/4HANA Public Edition as a viable option for net new customers. Sapphire also made it evident that S/4HANA Public Edition, particularly when paired with the industry-specific and partner-built content in BTP, is becoming an increasingly viable alternative to S/4HANA Private Edition for many companies. As such, GROW took on an important new prominence as a public cloud solution for larger enterprises that may have previously considered S/4HANA Private Edition and RISE as their only transformation option.
These changes reflect a long-awaited recognition that customers need support for the cloud journey that makes the most sense for their business and technology needs, even if that means maintaining non-cloud SAP systems along the way. This newfound desire to support customers’ own roadmaps and schedules extends to all SAP cloud offerings, with special RISE packaging available for customers wishing to migrate from their old ECC HRMS systems to SuccessFactors, for example. The changes will go a long way towards fixing previous problems with the rigidity of RISE that have come up in conversations with individual customers, as well as at ASUG Executive Exchange sessions and across other forums.
Another important change to RISE is that partners will be required to be certified as proficient in the newly redesigned RISE methodology – effectively a blending of the former SAP Activate methodology and the capabilities of the toolchain – or be cut off from the deal flow. This will help maintain consistency and standardization in RISE implementations while elevating the toolchain’s importance to SAP customers. It will also potentially create some friction in the partner ecosystem, something I will discuss in a forthcoming article.
The Toolchain’s Growing Role
The toolchain has continued its growing importance as a linchpin in Thomas Saueressig’s oft-stated need to improve implementation success while cutting down on cost and complexity. In this regard, Saueressig also used his keynote to emphasize the role of the toolchain in standardizing how partners implement SAP software in order to prevent cost overruns and unnecessary change orders.
This effort was boosted by a demo during Saueressig’s keynote that highlighted how migrations can be designed and implemented using the toolchain and a new product called Klario, developed by partner Basis Technologies. Klario is designed to provide a customer and its partner with an AI-curated implementation strategy, based on previously successful customer projects, that can provide a detailed plan for a cloud migration/transformation tailored to the customer’s specific business and technology requirements. That plan is designed to take into account the customer’s current landscape and its internal transformation resources, and it will integrate closely with the rest of the toolchain to optimize the entire project. While Klario won’t be generally available until later this year, its insertion into the toolchain and RISE methodology promises to help limit the guesswork that goes into matching business requirements to an implementation plan.
The toolchain’s ability to control excess implementation costs will take a lot of easy money—and unnecessary waste—off the table that normally would have gone into the pockets of system integrators. As such, the growing use of the toolchain is another factor in SAP’s increasingly complex dance with its partners.
What’s Next for ASUG Members
SAP’s new focus on heterogeneity, its refinements to RISE and GROW, and the emerging importance of the toolchain present ASUG members with a unique opportunity to better match their transformation journeys to their specific business needs. Below are five ways in which members can optimize these changes.
Revisit your strategy for supporting heterogeneity
Now that SAP has said it will firmly support the heterogeneity that matters to your organization, make it a priority to find out how SAP can help. If you’re using non-SAP systems, particularly from one of the major SaaS vendors, you’ve already been getting an earful on how well they support their software’s integration with your SAP systems. It’s important to start exploring integration from the SAP side as well: For many companies, allowing SAP to manage heterogeneity will potentially fit their business transformation needs much better than letting a non-SAP vendor take charge. The good news is that customers now have a choice about the mix of systems that make sense for their business requirements, and that they are no longer being corralled into a pure wall-to-wall strategy by SAP.
Revisit your RISE strategy and contracts
The new flexibility afforded by RISE may mean it’s time to sit down with your account exec and make some important changes, particularly if your company is looking at maintaining older SAP systems for the conceivable future. Many ASUG customers aren’t willing or able to pull the plug on the thousands of older SAP systems that are still in use, and with RISE able to support hybrid cloud/on-premise strategies, it may be time to get off the fence around cloud transformation and start building a program around a RISE contract that – finally – genuinely meets your company’s needs and moves you to the cloud as quickly as possible.
Think Public Cloud
S/4HANA Public Edition continues to evolve, and if you’re not watching the Public Edition roadmap it’s time to do so. It’s clear that SAP is dedicated to making Public Edition a viable option for companies with large, complex landscapes, and the fact that industry-specific functionality runs in BTP outside of Public—or Private—Edition means that moving to the public cloud doesn’t necessarily require sacrificing the industry-specific functionality that your company has grown to depend on in its on-premise SAP systems. You owe it to yourself to at least try to actively include Public Edition in your strategy – the benefits are likely to surprise you.
Build internal capabilities around the toolchain
The transformation toolchain is an innovation in the development in enterprise software implementations comparable in magnitude to client/server computing of the 1990s and the Internet of the 2000s. While there are important elements of the toolchain’s functionality that are still pending, the functionality it provides today can already deliver significant benefits in cost savings and implementation times, while delivering a better match between business requirements and SAP technology. Investing the time in getting to know the toolchain and how its components work together will be time very well spent.
Stay tuned for changes in how you pick partners
Everything we heard at Sapphire is leading to a fundamental change in how SAP works with its partner ecosystem – and that means how you pick and work with partners will also be undergoing some fundamental changes. I will be exploring this increasingly important—and complex—dynamic in a forthcoming article in ASUG News & Views. Coming to your inbox soon.
For more reactions/takeaways from the 2025 SAP Sapphire & ASUG Annual Conference, tune into the ASUG Talks podcast.