How to Use Your AWS, Azure or Google Relationship to Get a Better SAP RISE Deal

Most enterprises negotiating RISE with SAP sit across the table from SAP with one hand behind their back. They have an existing multi-million-dollar relationship with AWS, Microsoft Azure or Google Cloud — and they never deploy it. SAP's sales teams are counting on exactly that. Your hyperscaler relationship is one of the most powerful and most consistently underused levers available in any SAP RISE negotiation, and this guide shows you precisely how to use it.

RISE with SAP runs on hyperscaler infrastructure. SAP has formal partnerships with AWS, Azure and GCP. SAP needs those hyperscaler relationships to grow its cloud revenue. And hyperscalers have their own incentives to help you get a better SAP deal — because your SAP workloads land on their infrastructure. Once you understand that dynamic, the negotiating strategy writes itself.

Why Your Hyperscaler Relationship Matters in a SAP RISE Deal

RISE with SAP is a managed cloud subscription. The infrastructure component — servers, storage, networking — is provided by a hyperscaler partner. SAP bundles that infrastructure cost into your RISE subscription and manages the relationship with the cloud provider on your behalf. But that does not mean your existing relationship with that hyperscaler becomes irrelevant. Far from it.

There are three mechanisms through which your hyperscaler position creates RISE negotiation leverage:

1. Marketplace channel: All three major hyperscalers offer SAP software through their cloud marketplaces. Purchasing RISE through the AWS Marketplace, Azure Marketplace or Google Cloud Marketplace allows you to consume committed cloud spend (EDP, MACC, CUD commitments) against your SAP subscription — reducing net cost without SAP discounting its list price.
2. Infrastructure-level negotiation: If you are a large existing customer of a specific hyperscaler, that hyperscaler's enterprise sales team has an interest in landing your SAP workloads on their infrastructure. They can and do provide commercial support — including credits, co-investment funding, and pricing assistance — to help close SAP deals that run on their cloud.
3. Competitive cloud selection pressure: If you genuinely have flexibility over which hyperscaler hosts your SAP environment, running a competitive process — even informally — creates pressure on both SAP and the competing hyperscalers to improve terms.

The Three Hyperscaler Strategies Explained

Strategy 1: Consuming RISE Through the Cloud Marketplace

AWS, Azure and GCP all allow you to purchase RISE with SAP through their respective marketplaces. The mechanics vary slightly by hyperscaler, but the principle is consistent: your SAP subscription spend counts against your pre-committed cloud spend agreement.

For enterprises with an AWS EDP (Enterprise Discount Program), Azure MACC (Microsoft Azure Consumption Commitment) or Google CUD (Committed Use Discount), this is a straightforward mechanism to reduce the effective cost of RISE without asking SAP to move on list price. If you have committed to spend $50 million on AWS over three years and are only tracking to $40 million, routing your RISE subscription through the AWS Marketplace closes that gap while reducing your net SAP cost.

Key conditions to check before pursuing this route:

• Does your EDP/MACC/CUD agreement include SAP Marketplace transactions? Some early-vintage commitment agreements exclude specific software vendors — verify this with your hyperscaler account team before building a commercial model around it.
• What is SAP's published list price on the marketplace versus direct? SAP sometimes offers marketplace pricing at list without the bespoke discounts that direct enterprise deals carry. You need to model the net-of-commitment-burn cost against the direct-discounted deal to confirm which is lower.
• Does SAP have structural objections to marketplace fulfilment for your deal size? For deals above $5–10 million annually, SAP account teams sometimes resist marketplace routing because it affects their recognised revenue differently. This is a negotiable position, not a hard technical constraint.

Strategy 2: Engaging Your Hyperscaler Account Team as a Commercial Ally

This is the most underused strategy of the three, and often the most valuable. When SAP lands a large RISE deal on a specific hyperscaler's infrastructure, that hyperscaler wins. AWS, Azure and GCP all have dedicated enterprise teams whose compensation is tied to workload growth — and SAP ERP workloads are among the largest and most stable workloads in enterprise IT.

Your hyperscaler account team has both the motivation and, in many cases, the budget to help you close a SAP deal at better terms. The forms this support can take include:

• Cloud migration credits: AWS, Azure and GCP all run formal migration credit programmes. If your RISE deployment involves migrating from on-premise SAP to the cloud, you may be eligible for credits ranging from $100,000 to several million dollars depending on deal size.
• Co-investment funding: Hyperscalers sometimes co-fund go-live activities, proof of concept work, or transition support for large deals. This is not publicly advertised and must be negotiated through your account team.
• Pricing intervention: In deals where a specific hyperscaler is at risk of losing the infrastructure to a competitor, account teams can escalate internally to provide direct commercial assistance — sometimes in the form of discounts on the infrastructure component embedded in RISE.

Strategy 3: Running a Competitive Hyperscaler Selection to Create RISE Pricing Pressure

SAP nominally claims that RISE with SAP is hyperscaler-agnostic — you can choose AWS, Azure or GCP. In practice, SAP has preferred infrastructure partnerships and its sales team will guide you toward specific providers. But the buyer's ability to credibly choose between hyperscalers creates leverage, even if the final destination is predetermined in your mind.

Running a structured evaluation — with documented criteria, formal responses from competing hyperscaler teams, and clearly communicated decision timelines — signals to SAP that the infrastructure relationship is genuinely competitive. This can accelerate discounting and prompt hyperscaler teams to bring commercial support to the table earlier.

The competitive selection also provides an independent assessment of infrastructure costs embedded in each RISE option. SAP bundles infrastructure opaquely into RISE subscriptions. If you receive infrastructure cost estimates directly from hyperscaler teams, you can model what you are effectively paying per unit of compute, storage and network — and benchmark that against the infrastructure component SAP is charging you for.

Practical Negotiation Tactics by Hyperscaler

Hyperscaler	Key Commitment Programme	Primary Leverage Mechanism	Best-Suited For
AWS	Enterprise Discount Program (EDP)	Marketplace consumption, migration credits (MAP), AWS SAP Competency partners	Enterprises with existing AWS footprint, AWS-native data strategy
Microsoft Azure	Microsoft Azure Consumption Commitment (MACC)	M365/Azure bundling, Marketplace routing, Microsoft-SAP partnership credits	Microsoft shops with large M365 or Azure Data commitments
Google Cloud	Committed Use Discounts (CUD)	GCP credits, Google-SAP Cortex Framework incentives, BigQuery integration value	Data-intensive organisations, Workspace-heavy enterprises

What SAP Doesn't Want You to Know About the Infrastructure Bundle

RISE with SAP pricing is presented as a single, unified subscription covering software licences, managed services, infrastructure, support and BTP entitlements. SAP actively resists unbundling these components in negotiations because the infrastructure margin is a significant part of total deal economics.

Independent analysis of RISE deals — including those we have advised on through our RISE with SAP advisory service — consistently finds that the infrastructure component of a RISE subscription is priced at a material premium to what enterprises could obtain by negotiating directly with the same hyperscaler. That premium is SAP's margin for acting as the infrastructure intermediary.

When you bring your hyperscaler relationship to the RISE negotiation, you are, in effect, challenging that infrastructure premium. You are signalling that you have an alternative route to obtain that same infrastructure more cheaply. SAP cannot simply eliminate its infrastructure margin, but it can reflect pressure on that component in other parts of the deal — deeper software discounts, additional BTP credits, extended payment terms, or improved SLAs.

Timing Your Hyperscaler Leverage Correctly

The timing of when you introduce hyperscaler leverage in a RISE negotiation matters enormously. Introducing it too early — in initial scoping conversations — allows SAP to pre-empt the strategy and neutralise it before commercial discussions begin. Introducing it too late — after you have agreed in principle to a specific infrastructure configuration — limits its impact.

The optimal window is during the commercial phase, once SAP has submitted a formal proposal but before you have provided a substantive counter. At this point:

1. Engage your hyperscaler account team in parallel and brief them on the RISE deal in scope. Request formal commercial support — credits, migration funding, or Marketplace routing options.
2. Request a call with both SAP account leadership and your hyperscaler enterprise team. Present this as a co-investment meeting to explore how the hyperscaler relationship can accelerate your migration.
3. Introduce the alternative hyperscaler conversation at board level if possible — a documented evaluation process carries far more weight than an informal suggestion.
4. Build the Marketplace routing option into your counter-proposal as a concrete mechanism, not an abstract concept. Show SAP the EDP/MACC credits and demonstrate how Marketplace fulfilment reduces your net cost.
5. Request that SAP provide a Marketplace-equivalent proposal alongside the direct deal — forcing them to compare the effective economics side by side.

Combining Hyperscaler Leverage with Other Negotiation Strategies

Hyperscaler leverage works best when combined with other commercial pressure points. The most powerful RISE negotiation strategies we have seen stack multiple levers simultaneously — and the 2026 negotiation window makes this especially effective given SAP's own cloud revenue pressures.

Additional levers to deploy alongside hyperscaler strategy include referencing SAP's €2 billion cloud revenue shortfall and its implications for deal flexibility, using the ECC end-of-maintenance deadline to signal alternative migration paths, and benchmarking RISE FUE pricing against GROW with SAP public cloud pricing to create internal competition within SAP's own portfolio.

Our comprehensive guide to RISE with SAP renewal negotiation covers the broader commercial framework. The hyperscaler strategy outlined here is one critical layer within that broader approach.

Common Mistakes Enterprises Make With Hyperscaler Leverage

Having advised on a significant number of RISE deals, we see the same mistakes repeated consistently. Awareness of them is the first step to avoiding them.

Treating the hyperscaler conversation as separate from the SAP conversation. The two are commercially linked. Your hyperscaler account team should be briefed on your SAP negotiation timeline and vice versa. A coordinated approach achieves materially better outcomes than two parallel but disconnected conversations.

Assuming Marketplace routing is straightforward. It is not always. Commitment agreement eligibility, SAP's willingness to support Marketplace fulfilment for enterprise deals, and the commercial mechanics of credit burn all require careful modelling. Build this analysis into your negotiation preparation, not as an afterthought.

Underestimating the importance of infrastructure hyperscaler selection to SAP. SAP has preferred infrastructure partners for different geographies and workload types. If you are negotiating in a region where SAP has a strong preference, you need to understand SAP's internal incentives before assuming your hyperscaler selection is a genuinely free choice.

Summary: The Hyperscaler Leverage Playbook

Your AWS, Azure or Google Cloud relationship is a genuine commercial asset in any RISE with SAP negotiation. The three core mechanisms — Marketplace routing, hyperscaler co-investment, and competitive infrastructure selection — each deliver different types of value and should be assessed based on your specific commercial situation.

The key principle is that RISE is not purely a SAP negotiation. It is a three-party commercial relationship between you, SAP, and a hyperscaler. Enterprises that recognise this and engage all three parties simultaneously consistently achieve better deals than those who treat it as a bilateral SAP discussion alone. Our RISE advisory team can help you design and execute this strategy before your next negotiation window opens.

For broader context on SAP's current commercial posture and what it means for enterprise buyers, read our analysis of SAP's 2026 commercial strategy. For hands-on support, contact our team for a free initial consultation.