The New Role of Specialized SAP Consulting Firms in the RISE Era

For decades, large system integrators dominated SAP transformation programs. They had the bench strength, the global delivery centers, and the relationships with SAP to win the big deals. Smaller, specialized firms occupied a narrower lane — deep expertise in a particular module, industry, or technical domain — and often played a supporting role on programs led by the majors.

RISE with SAP has changed that calculus in ways that are still playing out across the market.

RISE is not simply a migration to the cloud. It is a commercial and architectural repackaging of SAP's core portfolio — S/4HANA, BTP, Business Network, and hyperscaler infrastructure — into a single subscription contract. SAP becomes the prime contractor for the underlying platform. The customer gets a managed cloud environment, a defined upgrade path, and a contractual relationship with SAP itself rather than a patchwork of vendors.

That shift has profound implications for how consulting engagements are structured. When SAP holds the infrastructure contract and manages the technical environment, the traditional "lift and configure" work that large integrators could staff with armies of junior consultants becomes less central. What remains — and what clients increasingly struggle to find — is the strategic and advisory layer: helping organizations understand what RISE actually means for their business model, how to negotiate the contract, how to sequence the transformation, and how to extract value from BTP and the broader intelligent enterprise vision.

This is where specialized firms have found new relevance.

The large integrators are not going away. Complex global rollouts still require significant delivery capacity, and the hyperscalers — AWS, Azure, GCP — have deepened their own SAP practices to compete for infrastructure and managed services revenue. But the nature of the work at the front end of a RISE engagement has shifted toward advisory, and that is a different skill set.

Clients entering a RISE conversation with SAP need advisors who can:

• Translate the commercial structure. RISE contracts are multi-year, multi-component commitments. Understanding what is included, what is not, and where the leverage points are in negotiation requires experience that most internal IT and procurement teams simply do not have.
• Assess cloud readiness honestly. Not every organization is ready to move its core ERP to a managed cloud environment on SAP's timeline. A credible advisor needs to be willing to say so — and to help the client build a realistic roadmap rather than one that serves the integrator's revenue interests.
• Navigate the hyperscaler dimension. RISE allows customers to choose their hyperscaler, but the implications of that choice — for data residency, AI and analytics workloads, existing enterprise agreements, and long-term architecture — are significant. Specialized firms with genuine hyperscaler depth can add value that generalists cannot.
• Connect BTP to business outcomes. SAP Business Technology Platform is central to the RISE value proposition, but it is also genuinely complex. Helping clients understand which BTP capabilities are relevant to their specific business problems — and which are noise — requires focused expertise.

There is a structural reason why smaller, specialized firms are often better suited to the advisory phase of a RISE engagement than large integrators: incentive alignment.

A large system integrator's revenue model depends on implementation headcount. The more complex the program, the more resources they can deploy, and the more revenue they generate. This creates a subtle but real pressure toward scope expansion, extended timelines, and solutions that require ongoing support. It is not necessarily bad faith — it is the natural consequence of a business model built on delivery volume.

A specialized advisory firm with a smaller cost structure and a reputation built on outcomes rather than headcount has different incentives. The engagement is typically shorter, the team is senior, and the measure of success is the quality of the recommendation rather than the size of the program that follows. Clients who have been through large transformation programs before often recognize this distinction and seek it out.

The shift toward advisory has also raised the bar for what clients expect from specialized firms. In the pre-RISE world, a boutique SAP consultancy could build a strong reputation on deep functional expertise in a specific module or industry. That expertise still matters, but clients evaluating RISE engagements are asking harder questions.

They want to know whether the firm has actually been through a RISE negotiation — not just read the documentation. They want to know whether the advisors have operated at the executive level inside SAP, inside a hyperscaler, or inside a large enterprise that has completed a cloud migration. They want to know whether the firm can speak credibly about the intersection of SAP, cloud infrastructure, and AI — because that intersection is where the most consequential decisions in a RISE program are made.

This is a meaningful filter. It has concentrated advisory credibility in firms that can demonstrate genuine, recent, senior-level experience across the full RISE landscape — not just one dimension of it.

One area where the role of specialized firms has become particularly nuanced is managed services. RISE includes a managed cloud component, but many clients also maintain relationships with third-party managed services providers for application management, basis support, and functional operations.

The question of how to rationalize those relationships in a RISE context — what to retain, what to consolidate into the RISE contract, and what to source from hyperscaler-native services — is one that clients frequently underestimate. Specialized firms that understand both the SAP managed services market and the hyperscaler managed services landscape are well positioned to help clients make those decisions before they are locked into a multi-year contract structure that is difficult to unwind.

If you are evaluating a RISE with SAP engagement, the composition of your advisory team matters as much as the composition of your implementation team — and the two should not be the same firm.

The advisor who helps you structure the business case, negotiate the contract, and define the transformation roadmap should have incentives aligned with your outcomes, not with the size of the program that follows. That is a different kind of relationship than the one you have with your system integrator, and it is worth investing in separately.

Specialized firms that have built their practices around RISE, BTP, and hyperscaler strategy — and that can demonstrate the senior experience to back it up — are filling a gap that the market created when SAP restructured its commercial model. The clients who recognize that gap and fill it deliberately tend to enter their RISE programs with clearer expectations, stronger negotiating positions, and more realistic roadmaps.

That is not a small advantage.

Astraeus Advisory Group advises enterprise organizations on SAP RISE strategy, hyperscaler selection, and cloud transformation planning. Contact a Partner to discuss your program.