Asia-Pacific Telecom Conglomerate Achieves 30% RISE with SAP Cost Reduction and Greater Flexibility

A Telecom under Pressure: The RISE with SAP Negotiation That Changed Everything

The client is a large telecommunications conglomerate headquartered in Asia-Pacific, operating across multiple countries with revenues exceeding USD 8 billion. Like most major telcos still running SAP ECC, they were under commercial pressure from two directions simultaneously: SAP's increasingly aggressive push towards RISE with SAP migration — see our SAP knowledge hub for related guides —, and a growing awareness that their existing BSS and OSS integration landscape carried significant unlicensed indirect access exposure.

SAP's fiscal year ends September 30. That timing matters because every Q4 (July–September) brings maximum pressure from SAP account teams chasing annual targets. This client received a RISE proposal in June — deliberately timed to close before SAP's financial year-end and before the client had conducted any independent commercial analysis of what they were actually agreeing to.

Redress Compliance was engaged as SAP commercial advisory specialists six weeks before the proposed signature date. What followed over the next four months was a systematic dismantling of SAP's commercial construct and a complete renegotiation of terms.

Why Telecom Companies Face Unique SAP Licensing Exposure

Telecommunications is one of the highest-risk industries for SAP digital access exposure. The reason is structural: a telco's core operations generate enormous volumes of business documents that trigger SAP's nine named document types, yet most of those transactions originate from BSS and OSS platforms that are not SAP systems.

A telco's billing system creates millions of financial postings in SAP every month. Its CRM platform creates service orders, complaints, and contract documents that map directly to SAP's document type framework. Its network management systems create maintenance orders and quality management records. In each case, the originating system is not SAP — it is a third-party platform that indirectly creates SAP documents.

Under SAP's digital access advisory licensing model, each of these externally triggered documents requires a digital access licence unless covered by a named user licence for the creating user. For a mid-sized telco generating 15 million documents per month across these nine types, the uncovered exposure can represent tens of millions of dollars in backdated claims.

What We Found in the First 30 Days

Within the first 30 days of engagement, our commercial assessment — standard in our SAP commercial advisory specialists engagements — identified four material problems with the RISE proposal the client had received.

Problem 1: Uncapped digital access exposure. The client was running 14 third-party BSS and OSS platforms that interacted with SAP through API and batch integrations. None of these integrations had been assessed against the nine digital access document types. Our preliminary analysis suggested the annual document count attributable to these systems was approximately 42 million documents — generating an indicative exposure of USD 3.8 million per year at SAP's standard pricing.

Problem 2: Migration credit timing. SAP's RISE pricing offered migration credits based on the client's existing on-premise licence value. What SAP did not volunteer is that these migration credits decrease by approximately 10% per year. The proposal was structured to close in SAP's Q4 — but our analysis showed that the same deal signed 12 months earlier would have delivered USD 1.2 million more in migration credits. This is not a coincidence.

Problem 3: BTP credit adequacy. RISE with SAP includes a bundle of SAP BTP credits. The client's S/4HANA architect had correctly identified that their Clean Core strategy would require migrating 140+ Z-code custom developments to BTP. The BTP credit allocation in the initial RISE proposal was approximately 35% of what the migration plan actually required — the shortfall would have been billed at list price after go-live.

Problem 4: Contractual exit terms. SAP SAP contract negotiation around the RISE contracts are structured as subscription agreements with limited termination rights. The standard terms offered contained a 36-month minimum commitment with no exit for convenience, no service credit mechanism for downtime, and no price cap on annual maintenance uplift beyond year three.

The Negotiation Strategy: Four Parallel Workstreams

Our negotiation strategy ran four workstreams simultaneously over eight weeks.

Workstream 1: Digital Access Quantification and Settlement

We used SAP's own measurement tools — USMM and SLAW — to generate a precise document count across all nine digital access types for the preceding 12 months. The actual count came to 38.4 million documents. We then challenged SAP's attribution methodology: several million documents had been double-counted because SAP's tools count reversals and corrections as new documents. After removing double-counted entries, the net count was 29.6 million.

We then negotiated the inclusion of a digital access licence bundle within the RISE subscription that covered the client's current run-rate plus 20% headroom for growth, with a price that represented a 41% reduction to SAP's initial claim. The bundle was fixed-price for three years, protecting the client from document volume growth driving cost escalation.

Workstream 2: Migration Credit Recovery

We challenged the migration credit calculation on two grounds: the applicable credit rate and the scope of eligible on-premise licences. SAP's initial proposal applied the lowest credit tier. We demonstrated that three categories of named user licences that SAP had excluded from the credit pool were in fact eligible under SAP's own conversion guide. Adding these licences increased the credit base by 18%, recovering USD 740,000 in additional migration value.

Workstream 3: BTP Credit Adequacy

Working from the client's Clean Core remediation plan, we built a BTP credit consumption model covering 38 integration scenarios and 140 custom development migrations. This demonstrated the shortfall in SAP's initial BTP allocation and formed the basis for negotiating an additional 180,000 BTP Global Credits as part of the base RISE commitment — at a blended rate of USD 0.68 per credit versus SAP's list price of USD 1.00.

Workstream 4: Contract Terms

We negotiated the following contractual amendments: reduction of minimum commitment from 36 to 24 months with a 60-day termination right thereafter; inclusion of a service credit schedule covering system availability and migration milestone delays; a price cap of 2% per year on the infrastructure component of the RISE subscription in years two and three; and explicit contractual confirmation that the 14 integration platforms were covered by the digital access bundle.

The Outcome: 30% Cost Reduction and Contractual Protection

The final signed agreement delivered a 30% reduction to the total contract value versus SAP's initial proposal. In absolute terms, the savings over a three-year term were USD 4.2 million. The savings were distributed across four categories: digital access settlement and bundle (USD 1.6M), migration credit recovery (USD 740K), BTP credit pricing (USD 310K), and infrastructure pricing and terms improvements (USD 1.55M).

Beyond the financial savings, the client secured contractual protection across all four risk areas identified in the assessment. The digital access bundle eliminated the exposure that had previously represented a multi-million-dollar contingent liability. The BTP credit adequacy ensured the Clean Core migration could proceed without unexpected cost escalation. The contract terms provided exit flexibility that SAP's standard RISE contracts do not include.

What the Gartner and Horváth Data Says About the 2027 Deadline

This client's situation is not unusual. According to Gartner data from the end of 2024, only 39% of SAP's approximately 35,000 ECC customers worldwide have licensed S/4HANA. Gartner projects that approximately 17,000 companies will not be migration-ready by the time EHP 6-8 mainstream maintenance ends on December 31, 2027. Horváth's 2025 survey of 200 enterprises undergoing SAP migration found that only 37 had completed their migration, with more than 60% running over budget and behind schedule.

The implication for buyers is clear: SAP holds commercial leverage between now and 2027, and that leverage increases as the deadline approaches. The time to negotiate RISE terms is now — not in the six months before your ECC maintenance contract expires. Migration credits decrease approximately 10% per year, meaning a deal signed in 2025 delivers meaningfully more value than the same deal signed in 2026 or 2027.

Companies that choose to remain on ECC past 2027 face Extended Maintenance pricing (2028–2030) at approximately 24% of licence value annually, versus 22% for standard maintenance — a 2 percentage point increase that sounds modest but represents a permanent uplift on licences that may already cost millions annually. SAP also introduced the ERP Private Edition Transition Option in Q1 2025, providing a RISE-based path extending ECC to 2033 for select large enterprises — but this option requires negotiation and is not available on standard terms.

Five Recommendations for Telecom CIOs

1. Map your digital access exposure before receiving a RISE proposal. Do not accept a RISE proposal without first understanding how many documents your third-party systems are creating in SAP each year. This analysis takes two to four weeks and changes your negotiating position fundamentally.

2. Run USMM and SLAW measurements annually. SAP will use these tools in any audit. Running them yourself gives you the data before SAP does, allowing you to challenge attribution methodology and correct measurement errors before they become the basis for a claim.

3. Model BTP credit requirements before signing RISE. The Clean Core strategy is presented by SAP as a benefit of RISE. In practice, it creates a new category of recurring BTP spend that is not included in the base RISE subscription at the volumes most enterprises need. Model this consumption before you sign.

4. Negotiate digital access coverage explicitly into the RISE subscription. Do not rely on general clauses about "included indirect access" — require specific contractual confirmation that each of your identified integration platforms and the document volumes they generate are covered.

5. Engage independent advisory before the SAP fiscal year-end. SAP's Q4 (July–September) is when account teams have maximum discount authority but also maximum pressure to close. Engaging independent advisory in Q2 or Q3 gives you time to complete your assessment and negotiate from a position of knowledge rather than urgency.