Below are, in my opinion, 5 of the most common misunderstandings regarding SAP Cloud for S/4HANA. It is my hope that fellow SAP Customers will be relieved that various options are indeed available to them. The theme here is that you indeed have choices as an SAP customer.

Misunderstanding 1—RISE with SAP Cloud is ONLY available with hyperscale public cloud IaaS.

The secret is RISE with SAP Private Edition, CDC (PE CDC) is available with on-premises or colocation datacenter IaaS so if RISE with SAP is a good choice for your organization, you have choices.

This RISE with SAP Cloud Customer Data Center edition shares the same RISE with SAP Cloud software code and SAP services as the Private Edition (without the CDC) which is hosted by hyperscale public cloud providers. See SAP’s Hybrid Cloud. This means SAP is providing customers a choice of how to deploy RISE with SAP–the public cloud multitenant edition or a choice of two private cloud editions–Private Cloud in a hyperscale public cloud (P.E.), or Private Cloud in a customer’s datacenter choice (P.E. CDC). It also goes without mentioning that customers can also continue to run outside of RISE with SAP offerings as well (subject to announced lifecycle rules).

Misunderstanding 2—RISE with SAP Public Cloud Edition is a good fit for nearly all sizes of existing SAP customers.

The secret is RISE with SAP Public Cloud Edition is a multitenant SaaS application that is minimally customizable wtih only a greenfield deployment available. As such, it has generally been adopted by new SAP customers.or organizations with less complex SAP requirements.

While RISE with SAP Public Cloud Edition is the closest RISE offering to SaaS incorporating automatic feature updates, existing customers may require some BTP customization or may desire brownfield or bluefield migration strategies (instead of greenfield), making RISE with SAP Private Edition, PE CDC Edition, or another optional method of running SAP more desirable.

Misunderstanding 3–Customers are widely opting for S/4HANA greenfield conversions instead of brownfield/bluefield conversions.

The secret is many new or greenfield-deployed SAP customers do not share the potential complexities of other customers. Conversion strategy can become more complex when dealing with large SAP enterprises.

Various articles have published conflicting statistics regarding customer preferences for brownfield, bluefield, and greenfield conversions and the reason for the conflict appears to be largely due to the relative  size/complexity of the customer organizations surveyed–larger organizations more commonly require brownfield or bluefield conversion while smaller or less complex organizations are more commonly permitted the option for greenfield conversion.

Misunderstanding 4–Since the SAP Business Technology Platform (BTP) is cloud-based, if a customer wishes to develop custom applications, automate, integrate, or use artificial intelligence, they must do so in a hyperscale public cloud.

The secret is that SAP BTP is accessible between clouds, colocation datacenters or from on-premise datacenters as long as each customer is properly licensed for BTP. BTP licensing is available in both RISE with SAP P.E.and RISE with SAP P.E. CDC but is not available in RISE with SAP Public Cloud Edition..

Misunderstanding 5— SAP AI and Signavio functionality can only be used if a client hosts S/4HANA in a hyperscale public cloud datacener.

The secret is that while SAP bundles licensing for specific applications, AI, BTP, and Signavio are all available either in the public cloud or outside of the public cloud. 

RISE with SAP PE bundles BTP and Signavio licensing however BTP and Signavio are also available for a la carte licensing with RISE with SAP PE CDC. AI is also available to both hosting options.

While both the ASUG and DSAG user groups have expressed concern regarding a potential lack of customer choice, SAP is indeed providing customer choice–even if some of those choices are a bit less commonly understood.