What is a difference SAP RISE vs SAP GROW (GROW with SAP)?

SAP tries to pitch its S/4 cloud solution to its customers very hard for a years. However as per surveys conducted by the SAP User groups like ASUG or DSAG the adoption is not at the level SAP would wish it would be.

Therefore, SAP continues to provide offerings to help customers with their transformation to S/4. It started back in 2021 with SAP RISE followed by this year (March 21^st 2023) Sapphire when another offering – SAP GROW (or Grow with SAP) was introduced.

Let’s look at the both offerings in the nutshell.

The SAP RISE is an offering that combines SAP S/4HANA Cloud public and private edition, accelerated adoption services (e.g. SAP Readiness Check, Custom Code Migration, etc.), SAP Signavio to manage business processes, pre-configured best practices. See more information here.

The SAP GROW is also build on SAP S/4HANA Cloud public edition with the focus on midsize companies where the business processes are more standardized.

The main difference between them is that RISE with SAP is more flexible and customizable, while GROW with SAP is more standardized and out-of-the-box. RISE with SAP targets larger and more complex businesses, and offers both public and private cloud options for SAP S/4HANA. On the other hand GROW with SAP focuses on midsize companies, and only provides SAP S/4HANA Cloud, public edition.

 

More information:

SAP RISE (RISE with SAP) blog

RISE page

RISE online docu

GROW page

SAP RISE (RISE with SAP)

In January 2021 SAP has come up with a new offering called RISE with SAP. It is the latest move to push a sales of its cloud software. Branded, as the offering that brings all pieces a customers need to have in order to transfer their business. So called business transformation as a service (BTaaS).

(Rise logo – credit SAP)

The service includes, software and hosting offer, which can involve a lift and shift of an existing application portfolio to the cloud, part of process analysis (via acquisition of Signavio), migrations to the latest HANA-backed version of the software and a lot of business process change. Customer signed to this service (on subscription basis) will have one responsible party for service-level agreement, operations and support. It includes: BTaaS, Infrastructure as a Service (from SAP or a hyperscaler (Azure, GPC, most like AWS too)), Cloud Managed Services – CMS (from SAP), and Application Managed Services – AMS (from SAP or a systems integrator).

In past there were similar solutions (although at lower scale) trying to push customers towards running SAP’s HANA based software in cloud. Around year 2013; it was HANA Enterprise Cloud. Back then HANA wasn’t offered by major cloud providers and it required special hardware to run it on. That killed this initiative. Nowadays; the hyperscalers are offering the HANA hosting however, there is another problem. Move to HANA still lacks the business case. There is no killer application for HANA. Similarly, as push to cloud is driven by cloud providers SAP has nothing to say about it to customers. 

With the SAP RISE offering, the SAP is trying to address issues like those. By offering a service of business process mining (included in process analysis /business process change - BTaaS) it can build the case for HANA move (e.g. of legacy ECC running on any DB). By offering cloud migration (CMS), it can help customers who has no cloud experience yet. Finally, by offering AMS on top of above and having it on one single contract (e.g. also having SLAs defined against single vendor) can help to reduce overall TCO. Let’s see in future how does this offering will be picked up by a market.

More information:

RISE with SAP

RISE accouchement

RISE overview

SAP RISE FAQ