In the 29th episode of the Burning Platform series is Geoff Scott, CEO of ASUG (Americas' SAP User Group). He provides perspective on RISE by SAP - the recently announced SAP initiative. See Analyst Cam post about it here. Dennis Howlett of Diginomica had provided his feedback here.
Geoff and ASUG had worked with SAP in envisioning RISE and he provides that nuanced perspective and that of his membership. We have a friendly debate on the topic - we keep it light hearted weaving in the Super Bowl and the iPhone 12.
I make the point that RISE is a complex bundle. In his keynote, Christian took at swipe at the term "simplification". That's been SAP's mantra for the last decade or so. Key execs like Christian, Juergen Mueller and Thomas Saueressig are articulate about RISE. I told him I was reminded of Thomas Kurian's encyclopedic knowledge when he was at Oracle. We discuss if that level of intimate product knowledge can carry over further down the organization, in the field and in the partner ecosystem. Geoff rightfully points out SAP deals with complex, global customers - anything like RISE cannot be simple.
SAP has historically not done a great job managing its SI partners, so how would RISE improve that? The pandemic has shocked the SI ecosystem with WFH and travel restrictions and pressure on them to automate operations. It would be nice for RISE to build on that not just continue to pass along poor SI performance. Geoff points out he would also like SAP to deliver more tooling to automate implementations.
During the pandemic we have seen customers move to bite-size, industry specific projects. Salesforce, Workday, ServiceNow, others have accordingly made some adjustments. We discuss why RISE with S/4 looming large does not come across as bite-sized, or verticalized enough. Geoff provides the perspective that he is seeing growing interest in S/4 in his membership. Throughout March ASUG is running a series of S/4 Best Practice sessions and they are seeing huge interest - register here
We also discuss the BPI imitative, SAP's hyperscaler partners and much more. I think Geoff does a nice job explaining which SAP customers should care about RISE and why.
