RISE with SAP and GROW with SAP: similarities

and differences
Published on Dec 17, 2023

Anurag Barua Follow

Versatile digital transformation leader & SAP…
Published Dec 17, 2023

In recent times, there has been a lot of content emanating from SAP on RISE and GROW.
Or you may have been reading blogs, articles, news reports, analyst’s opinions etc. on
these two topics. I have presented on these topics to numerous customers, partners, &
prospects, and at numerous SAP conferences all over the world and have contributed to
this growing body of information. But does the dissemination of all this information
mean that our target audience grasps the essentials of RISE and GROW? Based on my
personal experience, the answer unfortunately, is ‘a little’, optimistically speaking, and
‘no’, realistically speaking. Even customers who have heard these terms and claim some
familiarity with them acknowledge that they are confused. Therefore, in this article, I will
attempt to explain the primary ties that bind RISE and GROW and the key aspects that
separate them, in as lucid a manner as possible with the hope that you have a clear and
actionable understanding of these.

For separate introductions to RISE and GROW before you proceed further, please read my
articles:

How the customer benefits from SAP RISE at RISE article

GROW with SAP: A Primer at GROW with SAP: A Primer

Similarities

They are commercial packages of applications, accelerators, and services.

72 · 6 Comments
It is important to remember that they are neither just applications nor services by
themselves but packaged
Like commercial offerings.
CommentThis seems to be a common
Share point of
confusion. Therefore, the closest analogy that I can provide from a packaging aspect
during the holiday season is to a gift basket. You order, say, two different gift baskets.
Both satisfy your urge to add calories and imbibe more sugar during the holiday season.
They both contain the same kinds of cookies but different kinds of cheeses. One box
contains nuts, the other does not. One basket contains wine, the other does not. You can
also customize these baskets with your favorite nuts and cheeses. Basically, you can
consider one basket to be RISE, and the other GROW.

Enablement and acceleration of customers’ move to the cloud.

When you think about these two offerings, if there is one word that should come to your
mind immediately, it is ‘cloud’. They provide both the engine and the fuel that power your
journey to the cloud.

I have tried to encapsulate the ‘before’ RISE or GROW and ‘after’ in the diagram above.
Most companies today have needlessly complex landscapes that are predominantly on-
premise with some cloud components thrown in. Over the years, such landscapes have
contributed to rising technical debt. With RISE or GROW, SAP provides you with a
modern, open, scalable, extensible, and resilient architecture that caters to every
computing need of yours – IaaS, PaaS, & SaaS. Through our technology nerve center &
PaaS offering (the Business Technology Platform or BTP), you can integrate both your
SAP & non-SAP applications and both your cloud and on-prem applications (if needed)
with the core of SAP in a rapid, disruption-minimized manner and also extend the
capabilities of this core in a way that helps you create technical wealth and not technical
debt.

Utilize flexibility and savings of cloud economics

Both are subscription-based. You therefore purchase your subscription licenses based
on your planned consumption. There is no upfront capital investment that you need to
make. And since these subscription contracts are renewed on a certain calendar
frequency (such as yearly), you can adjust your subscriptions as needed. In addition to
helping you pivot from capital expenditures (CapEx) to operational expenditures (OpEx),
RISE and
72 · GROW help you minimize shelfware since you pick and choose only those
6 Comments
components that are relevant to you and only pay for those. The advantages compared
to the ‘lock-in’ style long-term on-premise contracts
Comment are quite obvious.
 An S/4HANA Cloud ERP application/solution is included in either package.

The most significant application component that comes along with both is the S/4HANA
(cloud) ERP application. If ‘cloud’ is the first concept you associate with RISE and GROW,
‘ERP’ should be the second. For many customers, ERP comes first to mind because they
are looking to migrate away from their on-premise ECC or Suite-on-HANA (SoH) on-
premise or S/4HANA on-premise or from a non-SAP ERP or from no ERP to S/4HANA
Cloud in a vast majority of cases. So, their primary driver for RISE or GROW is their need
for a S/4HANA Cloud ERP application.

Artificial Intelligence (AI) is embedded across their components.

The demand for AI as a partner and advisor, is growing exponentially. While SAP has
been embedding automation and AI into S/4HANA since the earliest of releases, it has
significantly ramped up AI capabilities in all its manifestations. The key point here is that
AI capabilities will only be bundled with our cloud offerings. A case in point is our
Generative AI co-pilot, Joule. The SAP press release of September 26, 2023, states that
“Joule will be embedded throughout SAP’s cloud enterprise portfolio, delivering proactive
and contextualized insights from across the breadth and depth of SAP solutions and
third-party sources.”

They enable and accelerate meeting your sustainability goals.

Both RISE and GROW enable your move to sustainability. How so, you might ask. SAP &
its hyper-scaler partners are aggressively investing into realizing green data centers.
SAP’s own data centers run completely on renewable electricity. This is just one of the
many ways in which RISE and GROW contribute to sustainability and ‘net-zero’ through
cloud computing. To learn about all the other ways (on the infrastructure front), please
read this SAP News Release from July 17, 2023: https://news.sap.com/2023/07/rise-
grow-with-sap-net-zero-journey/. On the applications front, SAP has made tremendous
strides and is a market leader in this realm. Applications such as SAP Sustainability
Footprint Management, SAP Sustainability Control Tower, & the Green Ledger are either
incorporated in RISE and GROW or available for subscription. These help you to plan,
monitor, and analyze all aspects of your sustainability targets, and progress towards
these.
72 · 6 Comments

A single contract with SAP.

Comment
A typical customer signs multiple contracts with various vendors that they transact with
for their application, infrastructure, and platform needs. This leads to accountability
challenges, varying levels of service fulfillment, difficulties in providing oversight, and
higher overall operational costs. With RISE and GROW, customers benefit from a single
contract that covers all aspects of IaaS, PaaS, & SaaS. In the IaaS realm, you do not need
a separate contract with (say) Azure or AWS or Google Cloud – it is managed through
your RISE contract. In the SaaS realm, it is noteworthy that it is not only the SAP cloud
applications that are covered by the single contracts but also partner add-ons/solutions
and SAP solution extensions that are on SAP’s price list. Another collateral benefit of this
single contract aspect is that it significantly reduces the duration of the contract life
cycle.

Complete & continuous support of SAP in their cloud journeys.

This point is a corollary of the previous one. A distinct advantage of having a single
contract with SAP is that you will have SAP’s partnership & support at all times. Even if
you should decide to choose another implementation partner/systems integrator (SI) for
the implementation/deployment, SAP will not simply hand off the baton to the SI once
the license deal is signed. This end-to-end support results in speedy resolution of issues
and successful outcomes at all stages of the project for all the parties involved.

Advanced cybersecurity

We live in a world of cyber insecurity and the threat of cybercrimes is a Damocles Sword
that constantly hangs over our heads. According to FBI’s Internet Crime Compliant report
of 2022, cybercrime has increased by 300% since the beginning of the Covid-19
pandemic and cybercrime is estimated to cost the US economy $10.5 trillion by 2025,
according to a report by Cybersecurity Ventures, to mention just a couple of the myriad
such scary statistics. Cyber insecurity gets exacerbated when you combine these
depressing statistics with the ongoing gap in cybersecurity skills. Companies are
therefore increasingly expecting vendors such as SAP (that manage and enable
transactions of over 400,000 companies worldwide) to shoulder the cybersecurity
burden. SAP, as a company, has security embedded in its DNA. And with RISE and GROW,
we address every aspect of cybersecurity both directly and indirectly. Thus, SAP
customers can derive the peace of mind that they are running securely.
72 · 6 Comments

Differences
Comment
At this point, you might be wondering why we need two separate offerings since there
are multiple similarities. The simple answer is that the global marketplace is too vast and
complex for us to take a ‘one size fits all’ approach.

To get an understanding of the differences between RISE and GROW, I have put together
this table.

In conclusion, there are more similarities between RISE and GROW than there are
differences. If there is one message that I want you to take away from reading this article
is that both provide you with significant benefits in your journey towards top-line, bottom-
line, and green-line growth by unleashing the power of the cloud. Therefore, I would
encourage you to approach them as true enablers & accelerators for your cloud journey.

For questions on RISE and GROW, please reach out to your SAP Account Executive or
your SAP point of contact.
Add a comment...

Thomas Madonna, MBA 3h

Vice President @ SAP Industry Advisory | MBA | Executive Leadership Certification | Management Consulting and Advisory

Great summary of the products. I have tagged my team to review and use as needed in their
conversations.

Scott Campbell
Lance Senoyuit
Brenda Boudreaux
Craig Quantz
Stuart Harris
Michael Liss
Dave Blatner
Katie Jensen Sedgwick
Elssa Abera
Rahaf Assaleh, mMBA, PMP

Like · Reply 1 Reaction

Shawn Brown 20h

Showing businesses how SAP's Business Technology Platform perfectly complements modular software solutions to pr…

Great
72 · 6 article
CommentsAnurag. I couldn't walk away from this one without reposting it. I don't think we over-
communicate this message.

Comment
Like · Reply 1 Reaction
 Amy Craven 1d
Technology marketing and communications leader focused on customers' business results

Anurag Barua - thank you for sharing this comprehensive overview and summary table - it is a valuable
reference for us! I'm tagging in a few others. Jennifer Frank McGrory Diane MacMillan Kathleen
Niemann Tom Amenta Anthony Rocca

Like · Reply

Joerg Siebert 1d
EdTech / Stay hungry, stay foolish / SAP Alumni

SAP is on its way to become a cloud first company.

Thank you for the well written article.

It will be interesting to see, if all partner with follow the guided way with a direct contract between SAP
and their customers. Also, the difference between private and public cloud solutions (old versus new API
and programming model) will show in the future more often and lead to lean core discussions.

Like · Reply 1 Reaction

Patrick Maroney 2d
Successfully executed over 150+ unique Transformation & Innovation projects for fortune 500 companies

Excellent article Anurag, a topic of high interest. Please consider adding a link to your post/article in the
comments section of my latest weekly post aggregating key articles and upcoming events.
Unfortunately, I didn't see you article until mine was already posted, but I am sure readers would
appreciate hearing about it int he comments

https://www.linkedin.com/posts/patrickmaroneysap_hightechheadlines-events-ai-activity-
7141633892674912256-_vqE?utm_source=share&utm_medium=member_desktop

Tags: mary sibley David Kargman Jennifer Frank McGrory Scott Knote Lori Rosano Pamela Dunn
#hightech

Like · Reply 1 Reaction

See more comments

72 · 6 Comments

Comment