SAP's RISE with SAP support model is marketed as a premium, bundled, worry-free experience. One contract, one vendor, one throat to choke. What it actually delivers — in the version SAP presents at initial proposal — is a support structure that serves SAP's commercial interests more than yours. Response time commitments are looser than they appear. Escalation paths depend on goodwill rather than contractual obligation. And the 22% Enterprise Support fee, applied to a licence base that SAP defines, grows every year under escalation clauses that most enterprises accept without challenge.
The RISE with SAP support model negotiation window is limited. SAP is most flexible before you commit. Once signed, the template hardens. The strategies in this article reflect what experienced independent advisors extract from SAP during pre-signature negotiations — improvements SAP is capable of making, but will not offer unless pushed.
This guide is part of a cluster on the RISE with SAP support model. For the foundational overview, start there. For key questions to put to SAP before you sign, see our guide to RISE with SAP support model questions.
Almost every enterprise knows that SAP charges 22% of net licence value for Enterprise Support. Fewer realise that the base on which that 22% is applied is itself a negotiating variable. SAP typically calculates Enterprise Support against the full list price of your licence portfolio, adjusted by whatever discount SAP agreed to apply. If your licence base includes shelfware, inflated user counts, or products bundled into RISE that you will never fully use, the 22% is applied to an artificially elevated figure.
The first negotiating lever is to clean up the licence base before calculating Enterprise Support. This requires running your own Effective Licence Position (ELP) analysis before the negotiation starts — understanding exactly what you actually need, not what SAP's BoM (Bill of Materials) says you have. Our SAP license optimisation advisory typically identifies 15–30% reduction in the licence base for RISE customers who engage before signature.
The second lever is the escalation mechanism. Enterprise Support under RISE typically includes annual fee escalators tied to a Consumer Price Index or a fixed percentage, often 3–5% per year. On a 5-year contract, even a 3% annual escalator compounds the support cost by over 16% by year five. Negotiate a hard cap on annual escalation — 2% or less — and ensure the cap applies to the entire support fee, not just the base.
Commission an independent ELP analysis before entering RISE support negotiations. Remove shelfware, reclassify users where possible, and renegotiate the licence base before the 22% support rate is applied. A 20% reduction in the licence base translates to a 20% reduction in your ongoing Enterprise Support cost — every year, for the life of the contract.
The SLA terms in a standard RISE contract are structured to give SAP maximum flexibility and minimum accountability. Initial response time for a Priority 1 (system-down) incident is often stated as one hour — but "response" typically means acknowledgement, not resolution commencement. The distinction matters enormously when your production SAP environment is offline.
Negotiate concrete, measurable service level commitments with explicit definitions. "Response" must mean an engineer is actively working the incident, not a ticket acknowledgement from a helpdesk system. "Resolution" targets should be expressed in absolute hours, not vague commitments to use "commercially reasonable efforts." And every SLA tier should carry financial penalties — service credits — that are automatically applied when SAP misses targets, not dependent on you filing a claim.
Standard RISE SLA credits are typically capped at a small percentage of monthly fees — often 10–15%. For a production environment where every hour of downtime costs tens or hundreds of thousands of pounds, this is inadequate. Negotiate for credits that reflect your actual business risk. Where SAP resists, document the conversation — it tells you something important about how SAP expects to perform against its own commitments.
Most standard RISE contracts do not distinguish between SAP-layer outages and infrastructure-layer outages. If your hyperscaler (AWS, Azure, GCP) infrastructure goes down, SAP may disclaim SLA obligations entirely — even though RISE is sold as an end-to-end managed service. Negotiate explicit joint SLA obligations that cover the full stack, with clear RACI (Responsible, Accountable, Consulted, Informed) assignments for every incident category.
RISE with SAP is sold with the promise of a dedicated customer success organisation. The reality, without explicit contractual language, is that you receive access to a shared support pool with no named individual who knows your landscape, your customisations, your history, or your business priorities. When something goes wrong — and in any large SAP implementation, things go wrong — you are logging into a queue, not calling someone who already understands your situation.
Negotiate for a named Customer Success Lead with defined availability, minimum engagement frequency (quarterly business reviews are a baseline — push for monthly touchpoints in the first two years), and a written responsibility to escalate critical issues internally on your behalf. This individual should be identified by name in the contract, with a clear succession process if they leave the account. A generic "customer success function" is not the same thing and SAP knows it.
Do not accept vague references to "customer success" in RISE contracts. Insist on: (1) a named CSL identified in the Order Form, (2) minimum contact frequency in writing, (3) defined escalation authority, and (4) quarterly executive business reviews as a contract obligation, not a courtesy. Without this, your support experience is whatever SAP decides to give a medium-priority customer.
Our RISE with SAP advisory team has reviewed over 50 RISE proposals and negotiated average support cost savings of 25–35% for enterprise customers. We work exclusively on the buyer side — zero SAP affiliation, zero conflict of interest.
Book a Free RISE Contract Review →SAP is a large organisation. Without explicit escalation paths written into your contract, navigating a serious incident means calling the wrong people, waiting for internal SAP routing, and hoping the right engineers get involved before the situation compounds. The enterprises that fare best in crisis situations are those that negotiated named escalation contacts at multiple levels — technical, commercial, and executive — before the contract was signed.
Minimum escalation provisions should include: a Level 1 named support contact reachable within 30 minutes for P1 incidents; a Level 2 senior technical lead reachable within 2 hours; and a Level 3 executive sponsor reachable within 4 hours for P1 incidents persisting beyond 2 hours. Each level should have defined obligations — not just contact details. And the escalation path should be tested — run a simulation exercise within 60 days of go-live, while SAP is still motivated to prove the model works.
Most enterprises do not think about exiting RISE while they are negotiating to enter it. This is one of the most expensive strategic mistakes in enterprise SAP contracting. SAP's standard RISE contract includes exit provisions that were written to make departure as difficult and costly as possible. Data portability terms are vague. Migration assistance obligations are minimal. Notice periods are long. And the commercials for your final period of service — when you most need SAP's cooperation — give SAP maximum leverage to extract concessions.
Negotiate exit provisions before you sign as if you might need them in year three. Specifically: data portability timelines and formats must be defined (SAP's standard "commercially reasonable" language is inadequate); migration support obligations should specify hours, expertise level, and no-additional-cost provisions for at least a 12-month exit runway; and early termination fees should be capped, declining on a defined schedule as you approach the end of your contract term.
For a detailed analysis of RISE exit considerations, see our guide on RISE with SAP exit strategy.
Insist on: (1) defined data portability formats and timelines (90 days maximum), (2) written migration support obligations with no additional fee, (3) declining early termination fees — zero in the final 12 months of the term, and (4) access to infrastructure data and configurations sufficient to run a parallel environment for 90 days after termination. Without these, SAP controls your exit and its cost.
RISE with SAP bundles infrastructure from SAP's hyperscaler partners (AWS, Azure, GCP). SAP adds a margin to this infrastructure cost — typically not disclosed in the RISE proposal — and presents it as a single line item. This bundling makes it difficult to benchmark the infrastructure component against what you could procure directly.
Negotiate infrastructure transparency. At minimum, require SAP to disclose the hyperscaler contract SKUs, compute specifications, and storage allocations included in your RISE subscription. This allows you to benchmark against direct-procurement pricing and identify where SAP's margin makes the bundled infrastructure more expensive than the alternative. Some enterprises successfully negotiate a direct hyperscaler credit arrangement that runs alongside RISE — see our article on negotiating hyperscaler credits alongside SAP RISE for details.
For more on how hyperscaler choice affects your RISE economics, see the full analysis of RISE with SAP hyperscaler choice.
RISE contracts typically include a bundle of SAP Business Technology Platform (BTP) credits — a quantity of credits that sounds generous in the sales presentation and proves inadequate in practice. The terms governing these credits — how they are measured, when they expire, what happens to unused credits, and how the credit pool can be replenished — have significant commercial implications that are routinely buried in the BTP service agreement schedules, not the main RISE Order Form.
Negotiate BTP credit terms as a discrete item. Key provisions: credit expiry should be extended to 24 months (SAP's default is typically 12); unused credits should roll over, not expire; and the formula for credit consumption must be defined in advance for each BTP service you plan to use. Without these provisions, enterprises routinely find that 30–40% of their BTP credit allocation expires unused, while simultaneously incurring unexpected additional charges for services that consume credits faster than the sales scenario assumed.
For the full picture on BTP credit optimisation, see RISE with SAP BTP credits: the complete enterprise guide.
Our SAP contract negotiation team specialises in RISE with SAP commercial terms — SLAs, support costs, BTP credits, exit rights, and hyperscaler transparency. We sit exclusively on the buyer side and have never worked for SAP. Book a free consultation to understand what your RISE contract is leaving on the table.
Get Your RISE Contract Reviewed →SAP knows when enterprises are serious about alternatives and when they are not. The enterprises that extract the best RISE support terms are those that have genuinely explored — and documented — alternatives including GROW with SAP, SAP S/4HANA Cloud Public Edition, and competitive ERP platforms. SAP's commercial team responds to real competitive pressure, not theoretical references to "market alternatives."
Before your RISE negotiation, develop a credible alternatives narrative. This does not mean you must be willing to switch — it means SAP must believe you are. Engage with a GROW with SAP proposal process in parallel. Document the outcome of that process. Reference it specifically in RISE negotiations. SAP's willingness to improve support terms correlates directly with their perceived risk of losing the deal to an alternative.
Our broader guide on RISE with SAP negotiation tactics covers competitive leverage strategy in detail.
Negotiating better RISE support terms is only half the work. The other half is establishing the internal discipline to enforce them. Many enterprises negotiate contractual provisions they never exercise — either because they do not have a robust SAP contract management function, or because the provisions are not surfaced when incidents occur.
Before signature, establish: a RISE contract management register that documents every agreed SLA and support obligation; a named internal owner for each contractual commitment; and a quarterly review process that checks SAP's performance against contractual obligations. This infrastructure turns negotiated provisions from theoretical rights into operational reality. Our SAP license compliance service includes support for building this discipline in RISE environments.
The rate itself is rarely negotiable — SAP defends it rigorously. What is negotiable is the base on which it is applied, the escalation mechanism, and the services you receive for it. An ELP-clean licence base and a capped escalation rate can reduce the effective support cost by 20–30% without touching the headline 22% figure.
Yes, but it requires explicit negotiation, not requests. SAP has premium SLA tiers — including Preferred Success and Enhanced Service Levels — that provide stronger response and resolution commitments. Some of these can be incorporated at no additional cost for large RISE deals. Others require a fee. All should be evaluated against your actual risk of downtime cost.
Under standard RISE contracts, SLA credits are the primary remedy — and they are typically capped at a small percentage of monthly fees. Termination for SLA failure is a high bar and rarely available for isolated incidents. This is why negotiating credits that are automatically applied, with realistic caps that reflect your business risk, matters so much before you sign.
Before. Support terms are an integrated part of the RISE commercial package. SAP is most flexible when the overall deal is still at risk. Once licence terms are agreed, SAP's negotiating posture on support hardlines. Treat support as a commercial variable, not an afterthought, and negotiate both streams simultaneously.
The data from enterprises that have done so says yes. Our RISE advisory engagements typically achieve 20–35% improvement in total support cost over a 5-year term — typically 10–20x the cost of the advisory engagement. The leverage comes from knowing what SAP has agreed for comparable deals and understanding exactly which provisions are genuinely non-negotiable versus which are simply never challenged.
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Our RISE with SAP advisory covers every support term negotiation — SLAs, costs, exit rights, escalation paths, and BTP credits. Buyer-side only. Zero SAP affiliation.
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