The Strategic Origins of RISE and GROW

SAP launched RISE with SAP in January 2021 as a commercial response to a specific challenge: how to migrate its enormous installed base of ECC 6.0 customers to S/4HANA before the mainstream end of maintenance deadline. SAP ECC standard maintenance ends in 2027 (with extended options to 2030 at additional cost), creating a migration imperative for the thousands of enterprises running legacy SAP ERP environments. RISE was designed to make that migration easier, faster, and commercially accessible by bundling everything into a single subscription.

GROW with SAP arrived in 2023 with a different mandate: attracting net-new customers to SAP's cloud ERP ecosystem. GROW targets organisations that do not currently run SAP ERP, or that are replacing legacy non-SAP systems, and offers them a standardised, pre-configured entry into S/4HANA Public Cloud with minimal implementation complexity and predictable pricing. The two programmes serve fundamentally different buyer profiles.

Target Organisation Profile

RISE with SAP: The Existing Enterprise

RISE with SAP is designed for organisations that are already running SAP ERP — typically SAP ECC, SAP Business Suite, or an earlier S/4HANA on-premise deployment — and want to migrate to S/4HANA in the cloud. The target RISE customer has a complex ERP landscape: multiple modules in use, years of custom code development, established business processes built on SAP functionality, a material on-premise licence investment, and a migration timeline measured in years rather than weeks.

Typical RISE customers include large manufacturing enterprises, global financial services organisations, major retailers, and public sector entities with deeply embedded SAP landscapes. These organisations cannot accept a greenfield reimplementation on standardised processes. They require a migration path that preserves process continuity, converts their existing licence investment, and accommodates the complexity of their business architecture.

GROW with SAP: The New SAP Customer

GROW with SAP targets organisations that are new to SAP ERP or replacing a non-SAP system. These are typically mid-market organisations or divisions of larger groups that are not currently running SAP. GROW's central commercial premise is speed: because GROW customers start with SAP's standard best-practice process templates and implement a pre-configured system, go-live timelines can be as short as four to eight weeks.

GROW also serves as the entry point for companies that want the latest S/4HANA capabilities but cannot justify the complexity or cost of a private cloud deployment. Because GROW is built on S/4HANA Cloud Public Edition — multi-tenant, always on the latest release, managed entirely by SAP — the implementation partner ecosystem can deliver faster, more predictable, and lower-cost implementations than private cloud alternatives.

Deployment Models

RISE: Private Cloud and Public Cloud Options

RISE with SAP is primarily associated with S/4HANA Cloud Private Edition — a single-tenant cloud environment hosted on hyperscaler infrastructure (AWS, Azure, or Google Cloud) and managed by SAP. Private Edition offers the customisation latitude that complex enterprise landscapes require: the organisation can maintain a substantial custom code footprint, implement industry-specific configurations, and control upgrade timing to align with business cycles.

RISE can technically be contracted for S/4HANA Cloud Public Edition as well, though this is less common. The vast majority of RISE deals are private cloud deployments. Private cloud is the right model for organisations migrating from ECC because it preserves the ability to migrate custom logic, accept industry-specific add-ons, and control the environment in ways that a multi-tenant public cloud does not permit.

A critical commercial implication of the RISE private cloud model is that the S/4HANA migration changes the licence baseline. On-premise user categories (Professional, Limited, Employee) do not map directly to the RISE cloud subscription structure. The migration forces a licence reclassification exercise, and organisations that do not manage this proactively will find themselves over-subscribed. See our RISE Negotiation Guide for detail on how to approach the FUE modelling that underpins correct subscription sizing.

GROW: Always Public Cloud

GROW with SAP is exclusively built on S/4HANA Cloud Public Edition. This is a non-negotiable characteristic of the programme. Public Edition is a multi-tenant SaaS environment where all customers share the same underlying infrastructure, receive automatic updates on SAP's release schedule, and operate within the constraints of SAP's standard process framework. Customisation is limited to configuration and approved extensions; modifications to the SAP kernel are not permitted.

For organisations that can operate within the standard process framework — which covers the majority of business requirements for mid-market organisations in non-specialised industries — the public cloud model delivers significant advantages. SAP manages all infrastructure, security patching, and upgrades. Implementation costs are lower because the system is pre-configured. Total cost of ownership is more predictable because the subscription covers the managed service without the complexity of a private cloud environment.

Customisation and Flexibility

This is the dimension that most clearly differentiates the two programmes. RISE with SAP Private Edition permits substantial customisation. Legacy custom code can be migrated, cleaned up, and restructured as BTP extensions. Industry-specific solutions from SAP partners can be deployed. The organisation controls its upgrade schedule and can defer feature adoption until the business is ready.

GROW with SAP allows configuration within SAP's standard framework, approved extensions via the SAP BTP side-by-side extension model, and in-app extensibility tools. It does not permit modifications to the S/4HANA core. This means that organisations with proprietary business processes, specialised industry requirements, or a heritage of custom development that delivers genuine competitive differentiation are not good candidates for GROW.

In practice, many organisations discover that a larger proportion of their custom code is not competitively differentiated than they initially believe. Before ruling out GROW on the grounds of customisation requirements, conduct an honest assessment of which customisations are genuinely required for competitive or regulatory reasons, versus which are historical technical debt that a modern standard process would resolve more effectively. The clean core assessment described in our RISE readiness checklist applies equally to evaluating GROW suitability.

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Pricing and Commercial Structure

RISE Pricing: FUE-Based Subscription

RISE with SAP is priced using the Full Use Equivalent (FUE) model. The per-FUE subscription rate depends on volume, contract term, and negotiation. Large enterprise deals typically achieve negotiated rates of 30 to 50 percent below SAP's initial proposal. Annual support at approximately 22 percent of net licence value is replaced by the RISE subscription, which bundles software, infrastructure, and managed services.

The indirect access dimension — measured under SAP's DDLC metric — remains commercially relevant in RISE. Third-party systems that interact with SAP data require Digital Access entitlements within the RISE subscription. Organisations that do not map and price this explicitly at contract signature face supplemental charges post-go-live. This is a RISE-specific commercial risk that does not apply to GROW in the same way.

GROW Pricing: Modular and Transparent

GROW with SAP offers a more modular, transparent pricing structure than RISE. The programme is built on S/4HANA Cloud Public Edition pricing, which is available on SAP's public pricing pages. User tiers include Professional, Core, and Advanced classifications, each with defined functionality scope and published list prices. The public cloud pricing structure is inherently more auditable than the RISE bundle because the components are individually priced rather than bundled.

Implementation costs for GROW are typically lower than RISE because the pre-configured system reduces the scope of implementation partner engagement. A well-scoped GROW implementation for a mid-market organisation can be delivered in 12 to 16 weeks; a comparable RISE implementation for a complex enterprise landscape takes 12 to 24 months. The total cost of a GROW programme — subscription plus implementation — is often significantly lower than a RISE programme of equivalent functional scope.

Migration Complexity and Timeline

RISE with SAP migrations from ECC involve system conversion (brownfield), selective data transition (bluefield), or greenfield reimplementation. The conversion approach is most common for large enterprises because it preserves configuration and historical data while converting the system to S/4HANA architecture. Even with an optimised conversion approach, a typical enterprise RISE migration takes 12 to 24 months, requires significant internal resource, and involves material implementation partner cost.

GROW with SAP implementations are greenfield by definition — the organisation starts fresh with SAP's standard processes and migrates only the data needed for operations going forward. This eliminates the technical complexity of system conversion but requires the organisation to accept process change more broadly. For organisations in the middle of an ERP replacement decision (not a migration), GROW's speed advantage is substantial.

"The fundamental question is not which programme SAP prefers to sell you. It is which deployment model matches your technical starting point, process complexity, and commercial risk tolerance. RISE and GROW are designed for different buyers."

The DDLC and Indirect Access Dimension

Indirect access — the use of SAP data by third-party systems — is measured by SAP using the Document-Driven Licensing Concept (DDLC). Under DDLC, when a non-SAP system creates, reads, updates, or deletes a qualifying document in SAP, SAP can claim an entitlement for that interaction. In a RISE context, this exposure remains active and must be explicitly scoped and priced in the Digital Access subscription at contract origination.

In a GROW context, the indirect access dynamic is somewhat different because the public cloud environment has more constrained integration patterns and the standard pricing includes greater implicit integration coverage. However, organisations using GROW that build material third-party integrations should still document and scope their Digital Access requirements to avoid post-go-live surprises. The DDLC principle applies to both deployment models.

Decision Framework: How to Choose

The decision between RISE and GROW can be structured around five questions. First: are you an existing SAP ERP customer? If yes, RISE is the default path — GROW does not provide a migration mechanism from ECC. If no, both are technically available, but GROW's simplicity advantage is strongest for new SAP customers.

Second: how complex is your process and customisation footprint? High complexity (extensive custom code, industry-specific requirements, proprietary processes) points strongly to RISE Private Edition. Low complexity (standard industry processes, limited customisation) may be accommodated by GROW's standard framework.

Third: how much time do you have? If your ECC environment must be migrated before 2027 to avoid extended maintenance surcharges, a GROW greenfield is only viable if you are replacing SAP ECC with a new implementation rather than converting it. Conversion of an ECC estate requires RISE.

Fourth: what is your budget and risk tolerance? RISE involves a larger, longer financial commitment with more commercial complexity. GROW involves lower initial cost, faster time-to-value, but less flexibility post-go-live.

Fifth: do you have the internal capability for a transformation programme? RISE migrations are multi-year transformation programmes requiring significant internal programme management, change management, and IT leadership resource. GROW implementations are faster and lower-risk, but still require organisational change management and business process alignment.

Getting Independent Advice

SAP's account teams are motivated to maximise deal value. In practice, this means they may position RISE for organisations that would achieve better outcomes with GROW, or position the most expensive RISE variant when a more modest configuration would serve the organisation's needs. Independent advice from a buyer-side advisor with no SAP relationship creates the space to make this decision on its commercial and technical merits.

Redress Compliance's SAP advisory practice provides independent assessments of RISE vs GROW suitability, RISE commercial negotiations, FUE modelling, DDLC mapping, and post-contract licence management. We work exclusively for buyers. Contact our SAP advisory team or review our RISE Negotiations Guide for detailed commercial guidance.