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

The Horváth study offers a useful reality check on hosting preferences more broadly: more than two-thirds of the 200 companies it surveyed pursue a company-specific hosting approach rather than following SAP's own preferred path, with nearly half hosting on private cloud specifically for greater system flexibility, and only around 30% adopting the public cloud model SAP itself favours. That is a meaningful signal that a large share of the market, even while migrating, isn't simply defaulting to whatever SAP's commercial packaging steers them toward.

The honest answer to “RISE or traditional on-premise” is that it depends heavily on your organization's existing SAP team depth, your appetite for a subscription commercial model versus owned licensing, and how much you value single-vendor consolidation against the flexibility of choosing your own infrastructure and integration partners independently. It is a decision worth making deliberately, with a clear-eyed view of the subscription cost trajectory, rather than by default because it's the path SAP's own sales conversation leads toward first.

Weighing that trade-off honestly, rather than defaulting to whichever model a vendor's sales team leads with, is exactly the kind of independent assessment Orpington Technologies Inc. brings to a client relationship — the Canadian advisory firm can lead delivery under either commercial model, or evaluate an already-selected integrator's recommendation, without a built-in preference for one over the other.

RISE with SAP is a genuinely good fit for a meaningful share of organizations migrating right now. The mistake isn't choosing it — it's choosing it, or rejecting it, without actually running the comparison first.

IT leaders concerned about subscription cost unpredictability