You know your destination is SAP S/4HANA, but industry jargon and siloed communications have you wondering what the best path is to reach that destination.  This “confusion” is engineered into SAP’s culture and customer-focused mindset.  What’s the best destination for SAP S/4HANA?  It’s the customer’s choice.  So, choices are what SAP provides you.

But what if I’m new to SAP?  What if I have a legacy SAP estate?  How do I chart a course to RISE with SAP; GROW with SAP; or even a perpetual on-prem option for my SAP S/4HANA-led business transformation?

Well, you’ll be delighted and possibly shocked to learn we have a PowerPoint chart for that!  Just when you were yearning for a new slide from SAP – we delivered, and did we deliver big!

Here it is:

What’s with all the colors?

Nothing.  Some people consider “Red” a stop-light or warning light or do-not proceed at great peril indicator.  In this slide it’s just a color; that’s well – RED!  Denoting that customers who choose this path also choose a path absent of SAP’s cloud innovation roadmap including machine learning, artificial intelligence, and large language models [ML/AI/LLM].

The “Blue” boxes, denote your strategic path to staying in lockstep with SAP’s cloud innovation roadmap for the long haul.  If you’re heading to a cloud destination, then “Blue” is the way to go.

What about the yellow / orange lines?  Glad you asked.  That’s why I wrote this blog, hey these Blogs are always a little self-serving…  For those customers who are on the fence about surrendering their data center and going to the cloud with SAP – no worries, we’ve got a choice for you as well.  It’s the Hybrid choice….

RISE with SAP S/4HANA Cloud, private edition, customer data center option is the hybridization of our strategic cloud solution, RISE with SAP and is denoted by the yellow / orange lines….

You may not have known that SAP has a hybrid cloud solution for RISE with SAP, where you can run SAP S/4HANA as a cloud service from your data center; while accessing SAP BTP and SAP Signavio, and all the other wonderful innovative RISE components from the public cloud.  You can learn more about CDC here.

SAP’s strategic “hybrid” offering RISE with SAP, deployable in a Customer Data Center, is specifically designed to:

1. Secure an SAP cloud infrastructure and platform in a customer data center, that is backed by SAP, managed by SAP, and guaranteed to perform by SAP via an SAP Service Level Agreement (SLA).
2. Empower customers who want to run in their data center (on-premises) and stay in lockstep with SAP’s cloud innovation agenda, including ML/AI (Machine Learning / Artificial Intelligence), LLMS (large language models), etc.
3. Meet the needs of challenging industry regulatory compliance topics which may prevent running SAP in a public shared hyperscaler (utilities, public sector, healthcare, pharmaceuticals, aerospace & defense, etc.), you get the drift.
4. Address the data sovereignty needs of customers, governments, and industry participants to keep their payload data inside their country, governed by the laws of their country.
5. Provide a powerful and novel approach to address the desire to embrace a cloud OpEx model, while benefiting from a high-performance dedicated system with low latency.

So, there you have it, the complete RISE with SAP S/4HANA Cloud and SAP S/4HANA Deployment Decision Tree in one chart.  A 5-hour education in a three-minute read!

Lastly, I want to thank Roland Wartenberg, SAP business partner executive at Fortinet for the discussion and much of the content of this chart.  If you don’t know Roland, you can follow him here https://www.linkedin.com/in/rolandwartenberg/ – he’s a wealth of insights on SAP, based on his decades of experience in the ecosystem.  Wondering about Fortinet’s security platform and solutions for SAP?  Look no further than this link: http://www.Fortinet.com/sap .

Joseph Zarb
Head of RISE with SAP – Customer Data Center
SAP RISE Global GTM Execution
10 Hudson Yards, 51st Floor, New York NY 10001 USA

[email protected]

#RISEwithSAP