As mem­bers of the ASUG com­mu­ni­ty know all too well, dig­i­tal trans­for­ma­tion — includ­ing, for many SAP cus­tomers, migra­tion from on-premis­es envi­ron­ments to the cloud — is no sim­ple task. Progress toward tech­nol­o­gy mod­ern­iza­tion ini­tia­tives requires care­ful plan­ning, ded­i­cat­ed resources, and exper­tise in orches­trat­ing com­plex solu­tions to achieve mis­sion-crit­i­cal objectives.

It’s with this knowl­edge that SAP launched its RISE with SAP pro­gram in ear­ly 2021, designed to help cus­tomers tran­si­tion their on-premis­es ERP soft­ware, includ­ing SAP ERP Cen­tral Com­po­nent (ECC) and SAP S/4HANA, to the cloud at their own pace by lever­ag­ing a set of cloud solu­tions, best prac­tices, and ser­vices. Since its debut, RISE has been adopt­ed by near­ly 5,000 SAP customers.

To learn more about how the RISE pro­gram has evolved since its incep­tion and to gain insights into its tra­jec­to­ry, ASUG sat down with David Robin­son, who was appoint­ed pres­i­dent of RISE in July of 2023. Pri­or to his cur­rent glob­al posi­tion, Robin­son spent near­ly 20 years at SAP in var­i­ous roles, includ­ing in lead­er­ship capac­i­ties for the organization’s pub­lic ser­vice and cus­tomer suc­cess areas. 

In this first half of our con­ver­sa­tion, Robin­son dis­cussed the cur­rent state of the RISE pro­gram, the nec­es­sary dis­rup­tion of tech­nol­o­gy mod­ern­iza­tion, and the impor­tance of con­ti­nu­ity of sys­tem availability. 

This inter­view has been edit­ed and condensed.

ASUG: Con­grat­u­la­tions on your new posi­tion. Let’s start by look­ing at the cur­rent state of RISE and progress made since the pro­gram was launched in 2021. You just returned from meet­ing with your exec­u­tive advi­so­ry board. What were the big takeaways?

David Robin­son: Thank you. Let me first men­tion that any time I get a chance to spend close time with a con­cen­tra­tion of cus­tomers, it accel­er­ates insight. Doing so helps us under­stand what’s pri­or­i­ty and what’s tak­ing shape in our cus­tomers’ land­scapes, as well as where they’re con­sum­ing and find­ing val­ue in our RISE mod­el. In many cas­es, we’re help­ing cus­tomers max­i­mize the real ben­e­fits that cloud — and cloud ERP in par­tic­u­lar — can deliv­er to their busi­ness and IT organizations.

Once a week, I look at all our dash­boards to make sure that I see adop­tion num­bers all mov­ing in a pos­i­tive direc­tion. Regard­ing the cur­rent state of the RISE pro­gram, we’re see­ing our cus­tomer base con­tin­ue to expand and grow.

We’re see­ing that first tranche — that first pop­u­la­tion of ear­ly adopters of RISE — start­ing to gen­er­ate val­ue, and we’re mov­ing into renew­al cycles. All of this has been excit­ing to watch because we’re three years into some­thing that’s chang­ing the shape of our mar­ket and cus­tomer base.

ASUG: What are some of the lessons you’ve learned? 

Robin­son: Over the last two years, we’ve learned a lot. Some­times, the lessons were based on things that did­n’t go as expect­ed. But as the adage goes, if you’re not suc­ceed­ing, you’re learning, 

There are a cou­ple of things we’ve incor­po­rat­ed into RISE today — areas that look dif­fer­ent from how they did in 2021. The first is our ecosys­tem part­ners, pri­mar­i­ly our glob­al strate­gic ser­vice part­ners (GSSPs), our sys­tems inte­gra­tor part­ners. They’ve piv­ot­ed and turned a cor­ner in their adop­tion and incor­po­ra­tion of RISE into their own busi­ness strat­e­gy, plan­ning cycles, and resourc­ing strategies. 

When RISE was launched, they saw this as just anoth­er offer­ing from SAP that they would have to under­stand. They didn’t think it would nec­es­sar­i­ly affect every­thing they had already estab­lished or had in flight. Well, what we know now, tru­ly, is that RISE is very dis­rup­tive, because we oper­ate in a dis­rupt­ed busi­ness environment.

At SAP, we’re being dis­rupt­ed. Our cus­tomers are being dis­rupt­ed, and the GSSPs are being dis­rupt­ed, because of the rate and nature of change that cloud enabled. What we’ve done with RISE is to refac­tor and uni­fy all the dif­fer­ent inputs for a cus­tomer’s trans­for­ma­tion, includ­ing their busi­ness and IT oper­at­ing models.

A lot of that also requires align­ment with our GSSP part­ners who tra­di­tion­al­ly advise, imple­ment, con­fig­ure, and do many things for our mutu­al cus­tomers. Those offer­ings have evolved and adapt­ed. That’s prob­a­bly been one of the great­est changes for the better. 

We’ve learned to pro­vide capa­bil­i­ties that make that jour­ney rel­e­vant for a wider pro­file of cus­tomers. An unex­pect­ed ear­ly learn­ing from RISE was how quick­ly net-new cus­tomers grav­i­tat­ed toward RISE, and how well net-new and mid-mar­ket cus­tomers could quick­ly iden­ti­fy oppor­tu­ni­ties, run busi­ness cas­es, make deci­sions, and move forward.

We’ve done a lot of analy­sis, and what we’ve learned is that we have to focus on what I like to call the ​“three con­straints,” or three dif­fer­ent bar­ri­ers to trans­for­ma­tion. Some are tech­ni­cal because many lega­cy sys­tems have exten­sive appli­ca­tion cus­tomiza­tion. As a result, cus­tomers have issues in their cur­rent envi­ron­ments that they don’t know how to address as they tran­si­tion from an ERP envi­ron­ment based on a lega­cy on-premis­es oper­at­ing mod­el to one in which ERP is deliv­ered as a cloud service. 

Then, there are func­tion­al chal­lenges. Cus­tomers increas­ing­ly real­ize that the move to RISE is not just about achiev­ing par­i­ty with what they have in place; they’re get­ting par­i­ty plus tremen­dous val­ue. As they go through their busi­ness case, and as they get their busi­ness users on board, they can mea­sure the incre­men­tal ben­e­fit and con­tin­ue to do that along the way. 

As a result, a sig­nif­i­cant num­ber of func­tion­al assess­ments must take place. Key ques­tions revolve around the state of cus­tomiza­tions and mod­i­fi­ca­tions cur­rent­ly in place, process­es that are now includ­ed in the stan­dard S/4, and how to man­age crit­i­cal indus­try-spe­cif­ic busi­ness process­es that may not yet be stan­dard but need to be real­ized — say, through SAP Busi­ness Tech­nol­o­gy Plat­form (BTP).

We’ve start­ed build­ing method­olo­gies, and we’re pro­vid­ing tool­ing, automa­tion, and best prac­tices to accel­er­ate that insight.

Every cus­tomer has a dif­fer­ent com­bi­na­tion of real­i­ties with­in their cur­rent oper­at­ing mod­el. They have dif­fer­ent start­ing points. They may be on ECC; they may be on ECC on HANA; they may be on S/4. They may have a com­bi­na­tion of all of the above and have dif­fer­ent invest­ments in hard­ware and infra­struc­ture, in data cen­ters. They may be try­ing to decom­mis­sion a data cen­ter and get out of that data cen­ter by a cer­tain date. They may have made com­mit­ments to a hyper­scaler, and they’re one year into a three-year commitment. 

We have to under­stand all of that and help cus­tomers tran­si­tion to a future-state IT oper­at­ing mod­el — one based on cloud ERP. I like to call this S/4 deliv­ered as a cloud service. 

Those are unique con­ver­sa­tions that take place on a cus­tomer-by-cus­tomer basis. We’re invest­ing a lot of time in this area. But each con­ver­sa­tion is crit­i­cal to sup­port eco­nom­i­cal­ly sound tran­si­tions to future-state oper­at­ing models.

ASUG: You men­tioned your part­ner ecosys­tem ear­li­er. Are these part­ners work­ing along­side you and your cus­tomers to address these constraints?

Robin­son: They are. Our part­ners are help­ing us tremen­dous­ly. They’re help­ing us because — in many cas­es — they intro­duced mod­i­fi­ca­tions and cus­tomiza­tions to cus­tomers. As a result, they under­stand the busi­ness process changes that must take place. 

We often find that we’re not talk­ing about get­ting rid of any­thing. We’re just talk­ing about how we can refac­tor key require­ments that cus­tomers rely on. Sys­tem inte­gra­tors are cru­cial in pro­vid­ing access to the right solu­tions, lever­ag­ing stan­dards, and innovation.

ASUG: When you dis­cussed the bar­ri­ers to trans­for­ma­tion ear­li­er in our con­ver­sa­tion, I thought one of them would be cul­ture and the chal­lenge of change man­age­ment. What are you hear­ing from cus­tomers on this subject?

Robin­son: Cul­ture is def­i­nite­ly an issue. I’m inter­pret­ing cul­ture as cus­tomers say­ing, ​“Hey, everything’s work­ing just fine right now. Why are you touch­ing it?” Or, ​“Hey, my entire job is fore­cast­ing more infra­struc­ture capac­i­ty. What do I do if we don’t require infra­struc­ture man­age­ment any­more, because we’re con­sum­ing ERP as a cloud service?”

We run into these ques­tions a lot. We are help­ing our IT lead­ers — CIOs and CTOs — make the case for pro­duc­tive change. 

What I’m expe­ri­enc­ing is that lead­er­ship gets it, but they need our help by pro­vid­ing exam­ples, proof points, and ref­er­ences of projects that have been well-exe­cut­ed and pro­duced pos­i­tive outcomes. 

We can show orga­ni­za­tions that we’re not nec­es­sar­i­ly elim­i­nat­ing cer­tain resources and roles; we’re just refac­tor­ing where those roles should focus. We can demon­strate that if you invest a dol­lar in an SAP pro­gram, you’ll get a bet­ter return on that dol­lar, based on BTP and access to inno­va­tion ser­vices. It’s a bet­ter deal than keep­ing the lights on.

This is one kind of cul­tur­al real­i­ty. There’s some­thing else that’s sim­i­lar, if not quite the same. Some cus­tomers will say, ​“I already have a world-class IT orga­ni­za­tion, and I have best prac­tices to oper­ate my IT land­scapes. My SAP sys­tems are per­form­ing bet­ter than ever. I real­ly don’t see any incre­men­tal ben­e­fit. You’re not doing it any bet­ter than I already have it today.”

What we’re say­ing to these cus­tomers is that we pro­vide insur­ance that they’ll have the con­ti­nu­ity of sys­tem avail­abil­i­ty they require. What we’re giv­ing cus­tomers is a tremen­dous amount of return on inno­va­tion invest­ment that they may not have today, because those resources are tied up in deliv­er­ing sys­tem avail­abil­i­ty and there­fore not nec­es­sar­i­ly focused on exten­si­bil­i­ty and innovation. 

One of the biggest learn­ings from the 5,000 or so ear­ly RISE adopters is they’re get­ting a bet­ter ROI in terms of that rate of inno­va­tion. And they’re more focused on their resources, deliv­er­ing bet­ter or clos­er prox­im­i­ty to the busi­ness, rather than just clos­er prox­im­i­ty to the infrastructure.