A global manufacturer negotiated the entry terms for a RISE Private Cloud Edition migration, reduced the SAP opening proposal by $4.8M, and locked in three-year cloud-cost caps and FUE re-measurement rights.
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The manufacturer was running ECC 6.0 across an APAC and EMEA operations footprint with a clear five-year migration plan to S/4HANA. The internal decision had landed on RISE Private Cloud Edition rather than brownfield on-premise or RISE Public Cloud, with the strategic driver of hyperscaler infrastructure consolidation and operational outsourcing of the SAP basis function.
The opening SAP proposal for the RISE PCE migration carried a three-year contract value of $14.6M against a 5,200 FUE target estate, with cloud-cost pass-through, conversion services, and a one-time migration premium that the SAP team framed as standard. The Group CIO engaged us to negotiate the entry terms before the contract was signed.
The opening assumption inside the procurement team was that the RISE PCE pricing was largely set, with limited room to negotiate beyond a relationship discount. The structural negotiation work reset that view: the entry terms were negotiable across five distinct contract surfaces.
We mapped five negotiable contract surfaces in the RISE PCE entry. FUE baseline pricing, cloud-cost pass-through cap, hyperscaler selection and exit terms, conversion-services pricing, and the one-time migration premium.
Each surface had a structural negotiation lever. FUE baseline was being calculated on the current ECC user population rather than the target S/4 population, which was projected to be smaller after a parallel licence-optimization programme. Cloud-cost pass-through had no cap in the opening proposal. Hyperscaler selection was bundled with no exit terms. Conversion services were priced at premium rates that were independent of the migration scope. The migration premium was a percentage-of-deal structure that had no benchmark.
The negotiation was structured to address each surface independently, with separate workstreams for FUE measurement, cloud-cost architecture, hyperscaler selection, and conversion-services scoping.
Five parallel tracks ran across the twenty-four-week engagement. Each closed a measurable portion of the opening proposal.
We ran a target-state FUE measurement against the post-optimisation S/4 user population, landing at 4,100 FUE against the opening 5,200. The reduction removed $1.6M of contract value.
We secured an annual cloud-cost cap at a defined percentage with a reconciliation right against published hyperscaler list prices. The cap removed the open-ended exposure on the cost pass-through line.
The bundled-hyperscaler restriction was replaced with a hyperscaler-of-choice clause with pre-agreed migration cost-sharing for an exit at any of the three certified hyperscalers.
Conversion services were re-scoped against a documented migration plan that excluded out-of-scope activities and bundled in-house resourcing. The re-scoping removed $1.4M of services value.
The contract was signed at $9.8M three-year value against the opening $14.6M, a thirty-three per cent reduction. The FUE baseline was set at 4,100 with re-measurement rights at twelve and twenty-four months.
Contractually, we secured the cloud-cost cap with annual reconciliation, the hyperscaler-of-choice clause effective at year three, the conversion-services schedule, the migration-premium fixed-fee structure, and a renewal-price formula that ties to the corrected FUE baseline rather than the opening estimate.
The migration programme is now in execution against the corrected contract baseline. The hyperscaler-of-choice clause preserves the future architectural flexibility without renegotiating the SAP contract. The cloud-cost cap protects the run-rate against hyperscaler inflation through the contract term.
We treated the RISE entry like a five-vendor negotiation, not a single contract. The five-track approach reduced the deal by a third without compromising the migration plan.
RISE entry negotiation including FUE baseline correction, cloud-cost cap enforcement, and hyperscaler-of-choice clause work.
Read the brief →Migration economics, target-state FUE measurement, and brownfield-versus-RISE PCE decision modelling.
Read the brief →The PCE entry mechanics, the FUE measurement basis, and the five contract surfaces that govern the deal.
Reference on RISE entry pricing, cloud-cost cap structures, and hyperscaler-of-choice negotiation tactics.
How a global asset manager converted to RISE on a corrected FUE baseline with hyperscaler flexibility preserved.
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