Software firm builds a hybrid SAP model and signs a smaller RISE shape worth $6.8M less across seven years.

The opening position.

The firm operated a heterogeneous SAP estate. The transactional finance core ran on a stable brownfield S/4HANA on premise instance, recently upgraded. A discrete manufacturing footprint for the firm's hardware product line ran on a separate SAP instance shared with a captive logistics operation. An engineering data services platform, used by product development across the firm's software divisions, integrated SAP master data through a thin layer that did not consume SAP transactional capacity. Several smaller workloads, including service quoting, partner management, and a regional ERP variant for an APAC subsidiary, completed the estate.

The SAP account team had proposed a unified RISE with SAP shape covering the entire estate, with S/4HANA Cloud Private Edition on a single named hyperscaler, a unified FUE commitment, and a BTP credit pool sized against integration projects across all nine workloads. The proposal carried a seven year total contract value of $24.3M with a forty one percent headline discount against list.

The firm's commercial owner asked whether a hybrid model, retaining brownfield on some workloads and moving only others to RISE, would deliver better economics. The engagement was scoped at eleven weeks. Discovery and workload modelling in weeks one through four. Hybrid design and commercial negotiation in weeks five through ten. Contract finalisation in week eleven.

Four phase hybrid sequence.

What the workload segmentation showed.

The nine workloads segmented into three groups on commercial fit. The first group, four workloads, scored well against RISE conversion. These workloads carried high user churn, modest customisation, integration patterns that benefited from BTP, and refresh windows that aligned with the RISE deployment schedule. The transactional finance core fell into this group, alongside the partner management workload, the service quoting environment, and the APAC regional ERP.

The second group, three workloads, did not score well against RISE. These workloads carried significant customisation that would require redevelopment to fit S/4HANA Cloud Private Edition constraints, integration depth that BTP credits could not absorb economically, or refresh windows that ran late against the RISE schedule. The discrete manufacturing instance fell into this group, alongside the captive logistics operation and one regional finance variant carrying material custom code.

The third group, two workloads, did not require ERP capacity in the form RISE provides. The engineering data services platform consumed SAP master data through a thin layer that could continue to consume from brownfield without consuming RISE FUE. A small legal entity reporting tool ran SAP only intermittently and did not justify RISE entitlement at all. Both workloads were retained outside the RISE perimeter.

The original proposal had sized FUE and BTP credits against all nine workloads. The hybrid design sized FUE and BTP credits against four workloads. The commercial difference compounded across the seven year term.

What the smaller RISE shape contained.

The signed RISE shape covered the four selected workloads. The FUE commitment was rebased against the user populations of those workloads, with the firm's broader user base remaining outside RISE entitlement. The total FUE count, recomputed on this basis, ran approximately fifty four percent of the original proposal volume. The per FUE rate was held at the proposal price, with the savings flowing entirely from the volume reduction.

The BTP credit allocation was rebased to the integration projects supporting the four converted workloads. Three tier one funded integrations were committed inside the entitlement. Five tier two and tier three integration concepts, present in the original proposal, were removed from the commitment and converted to an optional expansion at frozen unit prices. The BTP commitment reduced by approximately sixty three percent against the original proposal.

The hyperscaler line was sized for the converted workloads only, with the brownfield estate continuing to run on the firm's existing infrastructure agreements. The retained brownfield workloads carried a separately negotiated SAP support agreement, structured to preserve maintenance coverage for the period required by the firm's roadmap. The total seven year cost across RISE, brownfield SAP support, and infrastructure closed at $17.5M, against the original full migration position of $24.3M.