SAP Announces GROW with SAP

⇨ SAP has announced GROW with SAP

⇨ The offering is aimed at helping mid-sized companies adopt Cloud ERP

SAP announced GROW with SAP on March 21, 2023. Modeled after RISE with SAP and containing some of the same components, GROW with SAP is aimed at mid-sized organizations that are looking to adopt a cloud ERP solution. GROW with SAP brings together SAP S/4HANA Cloud, public edition; accelerated adoption services; pre-configured best practices; embedded artificial intelligence and automation capabilities; and SAP Business Technology Platform (BTP).

GROW with SAP vs. RISE with SAP

When RISE with SAP was announced in January 2021, the primary focus of the solution was to move customers running on-premise ERP solutions such as SAP ECC to SAP S/4HANA and the cloud. An important part of that move was the transformation capabilities offered through SAP Signavio and SAP BTP consumption credits. But unlike RISE with SAP, GROW with SAP is focused on mid-sized customers who may or may not be existing SAP customers. For SAP, that means dealing with customers whose annual revenues are below $1 billion, a market where SAP has historically not performed well.

GROW with SAP is specifically targeted at mid-sized organizations and might include the existing SAP customers or new-to-SAP customers. That has been the case with a significant portion of both SAP S/4HANA and RISE with SAP sales to date. According to SAP’s official announcement, GROW with SAP provides “preconfigured best practices that mid-sized companies can immediately adopt.” It also includes SAP BTP, and the announcement also calls out SAP Build.

The big difference between GROW with SAP and RISE with SAP is that GROW with SAP focuses on SAP S/4HANA Cloud, public edition. Public edition is the multi-tenant version of SAP S/4HANA Cloud where infrastructure and software are shared with other customers, and the solution is hosted and operated directly by SAP. Unlike SAP S/4HANA Cloud, private edition, classic ABAP extensibility is not available, and any extensions must be created through SAP BTP.

The announcement also revealed that SAP is releasing GROW with SAP because “research shows that many mid-sized businesses find themselves growing rapidly and need their technology to grow with their business as they encounter the same issues related to global complexity as larger business enterprises.”

SAP CEO Christian Klein remarked that SAP is taking end-to-end transparency across the business to the next level for mid-sized companies with GROW with SAP. Klein stated that “GROW with SAP provides the agility and innovation mid-sized companies need not just today but for their success in years to come.”

What does this mean for SAPinsiders?

Since the release of RISE with SAP, the bulk of the deals that SAP has closed for the solution have been net new or mid-sized organizations. Even though the goal of RISE with SAP is to help SAP ECC and on-premise SAP customers move to the cloud using SAP S/4HANA Cloud and SAP BTP, it is also possible that a portion of the smaller organizations struggled with the complexities of a new SAP S/4HANA Cloud implementation. By introducing GROW with SAP and including preconfigured best practices that can immediately be adopted, SAP is streamlining the path to SAP S/4HANA Cloud, public edition, with this offering. It also shows that SAP is investing in enabling its largest customers to leverage the potential simplicity that can make it attractive to move SAP S/4HANA Cloud, public edition.

While this announcement came with significantly less fanfare than the RISE with SAP announcement two years ago, GROW with SAP is part of the broader strategy of having customers move to SAP S/4HANA Cloud and SAP BTP. RISE with SAP is more focused on SAP S/4HANA Cloud, private edition, the deployment model favored by three-quarters of the respondents to SAPinsider’s recent RISE with SAP research, while GROW with SAP is focused on SAP S/4HANA Cloud, public edition. Organizations should keep that in mind when making decisions on which product is the best fit for them.