RISE with SAP vs. Traditional On-Premise Migration: What's Right for Your Organization

RISE with SAP vs. Traditional On-Premise Migration: What's Right for Your Organization

RISE bundles licensing, infrastructure and migration services into one contract. Adoption is climbing fast — but it isn't automatically the right answer for every organization.

RISE with SAP, the vendor's bundled subscription package covering software licensing, cloud infrastructure and migration services under a single contract, has gone from a niche option to a mainstream one remarkably quickly. A 2025 DSAG survey found 48% of companies in the DACH region were already using or planning to use RISE, up from just 16% the year before — a tripling of adoption intent in a single year, which is a fast move for any enterprise software commercial model.

The appeal is straightforward, particularly for mid-sized organizations without a large in-house SAP team: RISE consolidates what would otherwise be five separate vendor relationships — licensing, hyperscaler infrastructure, database, migration services and ongoing operations — into a single point of contact and a single contract. For a lean IT organization about to take on a major transformation program, that consolidation genuinely reduces coordination overhead, and it comes with commercial incentives attached: SAP relaunched its Transformation Incentive Program for the first half of 2026, with roughly half of the incentive value now flowing