SAP offers AI to all Rise customers — in unknown, varying amounts

SAP has announced enhancements to Rise with SAP S/4HANA Cloud Private Edition, giving customers of both of its commercial tiers access to SAP’s artificial intelligence copilot, Joule, which the company has been working to embed across its portfolio.

As part of the announcement, the Premium and Premium Plus tiers of SAP’s private cloud version of Rise with SAP S/4HANA both now offer AI capabilities, although the company didn’t specify which AI capabilities would be provided in each tier.

In a release on Tuesday, the company described the Premium tier as an augmentation of SAP S/4HANA Cloud Private Edition with access to Business Technology Platform (BTP), along with low-code, generative AI, CFO suite, SAP Datasphere, and SAP Business Network capabilities. Premium Plus extends the Premium edition, adding sustainability features, as well as expanded access to generative AI capabilities and CFO solutions.

Both editions will include SAP AI units — credits that will allow customers to pilot existing AI offerings such as SAP Cash Application, SAP Business Integrity Screening, and SAP Field Service Management.

They now also contain SAP Datasphere, to provide seamless access to mission-critical data from both ERP and third-party sources, and SAP Analytics Cloud for planning, which enables customers to use data from all their systems for financial planning, budgeting, and forecasting, along with SAP Business Network. Via Business Network, customers can create a networked ERP with a supplier portal.

SAP said it will assign an SAP advisor to onboarding Rise with SAP customers to help them successfully navigate the implementation process. “Through initial personalized one-on-one calls and a series of recorded enablement content, the advisor helps ensure the customers are set up for success,” the release said.

Devil in the details

Geoff Scott, CEO of the North American SAP user group ASUG, praised the announcement.

“ASUG is pleased to see that SAP continues to expand the benefits customers receive when they subscribe to Rise,” he said. “Most notably, SAP’s latest Rise update includes some base entitlements to Joule and generative AI. We are also enthusiastic about SAP’s progress with their Rise with SAP Methodology, which continues to standardize the way customers adopt Rise and S/4HANA to ensure quality and consistency. This includes the SAP Signavio and LeanIX toolset, which should also help customers in planning the future of their mission-critical cloud ERP landscapes.”

But vagueness around what’s actually part of the offerings frustrates Scott Bickley, advisory practice lead at Info-Tech Research Group.

“They’ve done a good job of stating that they’re going to provide the customer with these additional benefits without providing transparency into what specifically the benefits will be, and at what additional cost,” he said. But, he added, on earnings calls they have been clear that if you’re not a customer of the Rise program, or the Grow program for midmarket businesses, you will miss out on innovations, something that has raised the ire of SAP user groups.

So, he said, “If you’re not a Rise customer, you are out of luck. You’re not going to have the opportunity to avail yourself of the AI capabilities of things like sustainable ledger and some of their more advanced capabilities that that they’re rolling out in the cloud.”

Prior to this announcement, Bickley noted, customers had to be using the public cloud versions of Rise; now SAP is offering AI capabilities on its private cloud versions as well.

“That was expected to come at some point,” he said. “Ideally, they want customers to move to the public cloud edition, because that completely locks down customization and works towards their goal of what they call ‘clean core,’ which is to basically have the same core ERP instance across all of their customers, with traditional legacy customizations and differentiation and functionality to be accommodated through use of APIs and their Business Technology Platform. That way your customizations — or extensions, as SAP calls them — are now abstracted away from the core. They can keep that data clean, and clean data, and lots of it, are going to be the drivers for a lot of the AI capabilities to potentially add value.

“What they don’t tell you here — and the devil’s in the details — is exactly what capabilities you would get with the Premium edition of Rise versus the Premium Plus.”

That raises the question of what customers can do with Joule in each tier. And that, Bickley said, is a complaint that a lot of analysts have had coming back from the company’s user conference, Sapphire, as well.

“They’re touting all of this capability, but they’re not really giving you the granular level of detail to understand how you’d apply it back to your business,” he said. “So there’s a lot of work to be done there on the due diligence side, for clients to really understand what they’re buying before they sign that contract.”

His advice: Start small. Concentrate on data governance and on making sure data is clean before considering migrating to Rise.