The SAP ecosystem is approaching a significant inflection point. The end of mainstream maintenance for SAP ECC is a fixed deadline, and the pressure on ECC customers to migrate to S/4HANA has never been greater. SAP’s commercial teams are actively managing this transition, the RISE with SAP programme has been positioned as the primary migration pathway, and the message from SAP’s partner ecosystem has been consistent: the time to move is now.
What is less consistently communicated is the commercial complexity that lies on the other side of that migration decision. Organisations that approach an S/4HANA migration as primarily a technical transformation project, without a rigorous understanding of the commercial architecture they are moving into, are routinely discovering — after they have committed — that the financial implications are significantly different from what the pre-sales conversation suggested.
The RISE Architecture and What It Actually Means Commercially
RISE with SAP is not a product. It is a commercial bundle: a subscription to S/4HANA Cloud Private Edition, plus a set of services and tools that SAP packages to simplify the migration narrative. Understanding what is and is not included in that bundle is the first commercial challenge.
The bundle pricing is designed to make the total cost of ownership appear favourable relative to the existing ECC environment. What the comparison frequently excludes is the cost of the transformation work required to move to S/4HANA, the cost of rebuilding integrations that do not carry forward, the cost of re-licensing third-party tools that operate differently in the S/4HANA environment, and the long-term cost escalation built into the subscription terms.
RISE is also not the only migration path. Organisations that commit to RISE without exploring the full range of options — including S/4HANA Cloud Public Edition, on-premises S/4HANA, or managed hosting arrangements — are making a commercial decision without a full commercial assessment.
Licence Metric Changes and Their Financial Implications
One of the most significant — and least discussed — commercial changes in the S/4HANA environment is the shift in licensing metrics. SAP ECC is predominantly licensed on a named user basis, with user types (Professional, Limited Professional, Self-Service) that map to specific capability bundles. S/4HANA has introduced FUE (Full Use Equivalent) as a harmonised metric, alongside new user types and application-specific licensing models.
The migration from ECC user types to S/4HANA user types is not a one-to-one conversion. For most organisations, the FUE calculation based on their existing user population results in a requirement that is materially different — often higher — than their current licence position. Understanding this delta before migration, and negotiating the commercial terms around it, is one of the highest-value activities available to ECC customers preparing for the transition.
Indirect and digital access is a further dimension. S/4HANA’s extended digital core means that third-party systems, automation tools, and custom integrations that access SAP data may now require additional licensing under the S/4HANA commercial model in ways that were not required under ECC. This is a source of significant unrecognised exposure for organisations that have complex integration landscapes.
The BTP Question
SAP Business Technology Platform has become an increasingly central part of SAP’s commercial strategy. In the S/4HANA migration context, BTP is often presented as the integration and extension layer that replaces traditional ABAP customisation. The commercial reality of BTP is that it operates on a consumption-based pricing model that can be difficult to predict and control.
BTP credits are consumed at different rates by different services, and the consumption model is designed to encourage adoption of the full SAP ecosystem. Organisations that have not modelled their expected BTP consumption before committing to an architecture that depends on it have consistently discovered that their actual costs exceed their initial estimates. The SAP Trust Center’s documentation on service consumptionprovides the technical foundation for this modelling, but translating service specifications into commercial projections requires dedicated expertise.
Negotiating the RISE Agreement
RISE agreements have several features that differentiate them commercially from traditional SAP licence agreements, and that have significant implications for how negotiations should be approached.
The subscription nature of RISE means that SAP controls the pricing trajectory over the life of the contract. Annual escalation clauses, typically expressed as a percentage of the total contract value, compound in ways that make the total cost of a five-year RISE agreement substantially higher than the headline year-one cost. Understanding the escalation mechanics and negotiating caps or alternatives is a fundamental component of any responsible RISE negotiation.
The scope of the migration commitment is another critical negotiating dimension. RISE agreements define the system scope that SAP is responsible for, and deviations from that scope — whether due to late-discovered integrations, expanded user counts, or additional modules — become commercial change requests that are priced by SAP after the organisation is already committed. Defining scope as precisely as possible before signature, and building in mechanisms to handle scope changes on pre-agreed commercial terms, is essential.
For SAP customers preparing for this transition, the SAP user community resources on S/4HANA migrationprovide valuable technical context — but the commercial preparation requires a different kind of expertise, one focused on contract interpretation, metric analysis, and negotiation strategy rather than technical implementation.
The Independent Commercial Assessment
SAP migrations are not primarily a technology risk. For most organisations, they are primarily a commercial risk. The decisions made in the 12 to 18 months before a migration commitment determine the commercial trajectory of the organisation’s SAP relationship for the next decade. McKinsey’s research on recalibrating technology budgets emphasises that technology leaders at the highest-performing organisations are deeply integrated into enterprise strategy — and the SAP migration decision is exactly the kind of long-term strategic commitment where that integration is most critical.
An independent commercial assessment, conducted before the migration commitment rather than after, provides three things: a clear understanding of the organisation’s current SAP licence position and what it is worth in the negotiation; a rigorous analysis of the proposed RISE (or alternative migration path) commercial terms and their long-term financial implications; and a negotiation strategy that uses the leverage available — migration commitment, competitive alternatives, contract timing — to achieve the most favourable possible commercial outcome.
Conclusion
The window for that leverage is finite. Once an organisation has committed to RISE, SAP’s negotiating position strengthens considerably. The time to do the commercial work is before the commitment, when the customer still has genuine optionality. That is the work that determines whether a migration is a financial success or a financial burden for the decade that follows. Independent commercial expertise, engaged early, is the most valuable investment an ECC customer can make in 2026.
