SAP Cloud ERP in 2026: What’s Included, What Isn’t, and What It Means for Your Migration

Since our firm first published the Cloud ERP (then it was “RISE”) F.A.Q., a lot has changed with SAP, the market, and adoption trends. It’s worth a revisit: how Cloud ERP is packaged and sold by SAP has changed significantly, as has our guidance for customers adopting the solution.

Perhaps the most notable change is the maturity of the Cloud ERP Private and Public solutions. Packaging is more consistent and better documented – if still a bit overwhelming – and by now the upcoming 2027 deadlines are having real impact, especially for Solution Manager, LaMa and Focused Run users; what’s required for a successful migration is better understood as well.

If you are interested, you can find the last version of this article here. But this update is a transition away from those pieces and starts with an assumption that the reader has a basic knowledge of the history of RISE / Cloud ERP. This time, we want to focus more on market observations of the current state and what it means for SAP customers looking forward.

The SAP community has risen and grown (couldn’t resist) to a good understanding of SAP Cloud ERP, but there’s plenty of subtle details to explore around the edges, especially for customers migrating from existing on-premise implementations.

What was SAP RISE is now SAP Cloud ERP Private

At Sapphire in 2025, the RISE and GROW brands were repositioned as implementation methodologies, and Cloud ERP Private became generally what was RISE and Cloud ERP Public became what was generally GROW. Generally, because the selection of Public vs. Private isn’t so much a question of organizational size and complexity as it once was.

Today, the idea of a large enterprise selecting a purely SaaS model solution isn’t unusual. Salesforce and Workday are notable examples, and today’s SAP Cloud ERP Public solution is perfectly suitable for large enterprises planning the first implementation of SAP or a new greenfield reimplementation. So, for business leaders in this position, Cloud ERP Public is a perfectly legitimate consideration, even for enterprises with a large scale.

For the Upper-Middle market – those customers under $2B or so – there’s no question public cloud is perfectly suitable for a first implementation. SAP has a strong offering for this market and specifically designed Cloud ERP Public for this customer. Putting on our “if we were SAP hats”: most of the existing Fortune 500 is already an SAP customer, and tomorrow’s Fortune 500 list lives in the Upper-Middle today – it’s a smart move for SAP to focus on this market.

But perhaps less expected has been the uptick in Cloud ERP Private for new greenfield implementations. One might expect the Public Cloud offering to have advantages in this situation as Cloud ERP Private puts much more operational responsibility on the customer. It does offer additional flexibility, however, as we will explore in detail shortly.

For Avantra where we see Cloud ERP Private, and especially the various versions of Cloud ERP Private (Private, Private Hyperscaler, Tailored, etc.) is for existing customers on a Cloud ERP journey. These customers, especially at the extreme ends of complexity, are facing the migration of millions of lines of customization and need more incremental and flexible ways to adopt Cloud ERP. The Cloud ERP Private variants give those large and complex customers a sensible path to the cloud and at the same time help SAP achieve goals for cloud adoption.

So, what’s included and not included?

SAP Cloud ERP is positioned as a one-stop shop, one-shop-in-charge, single-vendor, simple and cost-effective way to get started with SAP in the cloud, including all the necessary tools and services. This is sometimes the case, but for enterprise customers with existing, complex estates, there are details that can come as a surprise to an uninformed buyer.

Where SAP customers considering migration should perform careful consideration is the base level of a given version of Cloud ERP Private. This should include what operational responsibilities will remain on the customer after go-live and how they plan to address any gaps between what SAP provides and what they do for themselves today with an existing on-premises environment.

That difference between the basic Cloud ERP Private offering and what a customer does for themselves today can be addressed through a set of additional services called Cloud Application Services (CAS). This is an exhaustive list – most versions of Cloud ERP Private have a 50+ page spreadsheet articulating what’s included and what’s optional, and for most Cloud ERP Private offerings, many aspects of solution management typically expected in a SaaS solution are customer responsibilities.

Avantra has explored this thoroughly, as our Private ERP and MSP customers continue to depend on us for critical operational automation and coverage: monitoring & observability, HotNews and SAP Notes, patching, backup and restore, system refresh – there’s much more. For most versions of Cloud ERP Private, almost all of these remain either customer responsibilities or are additional contracted services under various CAS offerings.

The standard SLA for Cloud ERP can be another point of contention. Standard, SAP offers a 99.5 or 99.7 uptime SLA for unplanned outages. Many businesses hosting themselves are probably above this service level in practice, with 4-nines not uncommon in well-run large enterprises. So, existing business expectations for availability may be significantly higher than the contracted SLA with Cloud ERP.

Unfortunately, the costs of 4-nines guarantees are significant, typically requiring high-availability architecture, roughly doubling cost. Customers moving to Cloud ERP may need to retrain the business to expect something less than what they’ve experienced in practice – not because they were promised better, but simply because they typically got it and might not in the future.

An SAP Cloud ERP contract gets you the basics of coverage, some extras if you contract for them, and perhaps quite a comprehensive solution depending on your CAS budget or your ability to select Cloud ERP Public. This complexity makes it easy for new customers without significant SAP operations experience to end up with operations expectations outside the terms of a Cloud ERP contract.

The Observability Gap: Beyond the “Single Pane of Glass”

There is a common misconception that moving to Cloud ERP Private provides a “set it and forget it” operational model. A customer implementing Cloud ERP Public for the first time will come closest to this ideal. For existing SAP customers migrating to Cloud ERP, the “single pane of glass” is a challenge for complex landscapes.

While SAP Cloud ALM is an excellent tool for managing a handful of Cloud ERP systems and BTP components, it was never intended to solve the massive estate, “air-gapped” production or highly regulated requirements of a large enterprise. For these customers, the problem of IT operations remains largely unchanged: you still require a “best-of-breed” cocktail of tools — SolMan, FocusedRun, LaMa, and often third-party solutions — to meet actual business requirements.

Of course, much of that cocktail mentioned has reached the end of mainstream support and certainly the end of innovation already. Cloud ALM and FocusedRun have a basic integration, but it falls short of a robust, single point of observability, management and operations across an entire SAP estate. Add a hybrid transition, and the environment is not well-supported by Cloud ALM until after the full move the cloud is complete.

While Cloud ALM may be the ultimate destination, there’s an acute need for operations solutions including Observability, Landscape Management and Automation, Change Management and many other functions of the old solutions, but across the transitioning SAP estate. This includes support for an estate that’s in-flight to a new operational model to be achieved some years in the future. So, a changing mix of old and new for a while.

The biggest and most complex enterprises and MSPs have the most acute challenges in this space, and many are adopting solutions including Avantra to address the transition.

Operational Realities: Where Should Non-Prod Live?

A final technical consideration for those making the leap is the placement of QA and Development environments. While it is tempting to consolidate everything within the Cloud container, the decision must be driven by a cold, hard Total Cost of Ownership (TCO) analysis.

Moving transports, refreshing test data, and maintaining system syncs across a hybrid landscape adds significant overhead. If the cost of moving and managing these environments in the cloud exceeds the local maintenance costs, the “pragmatic” multi-year plan suggests keeping them where they are as the most cost-effective.

This approach further complicates the hybrid conversation and perhaps makes it a longer term or permanent reality for some SAP customers. But these customers were never on a short-term plan for pure cloud ERP anyway, and will be a reasonable choice for some, where cloud storage, computing and management costs for N+n would be a significant multiple of production.

The Partnership Model

With Cloud ERP, the way customers license SAP has shifted from a “one-way street” with SAP to a more complex ecosystem of hyperscaler and partner deals. SAP’s long-term goal was never to become a hosting provider, and while they certainly still sell Cloud ERP directly, it’s not the only way customers come to Cloud ERP today.

Enterprise customers are likely to appreciate the ability to license SAP Cloud ERP through existing agreements within their larger AWS, Google, or Azure contracts. This allows enterprises to leverage existing “commit to consume” agreements, essentially using their Cloud ERP spend to hit their hyperscaler volume targets.

The end of ECC support put fundamental pressure on the MSP market and helped give rise to programs including CCFlex. Here, customers looking for a fully turn-key solution can find it: a Managed Service Provider (MSP) brings the customer to the Cloud ERP platform and earns a portion of the Total Contract Value (TCV). This is a strategic win for SAP: the MSP provides high-touch service and application-level care SAP is not structured to deliver while SAP still gets to book the cloud revenue. This program means customers looking for this level of service and the value-adds of the traditional MSP market can still find it.

Migration is the biggest challenge for most

A decade after release of S/4HANA, our data regarding systems under management reveals 30% of what we manage as S/4 vs ECC. There’s plenty of analyst data out there with migrations at around half over the next few years. Our customers include the biggest and most complex SAP deployments, so we expect our data to reflect the reality of the most complex migrations, too. Still, these are telling numbers.

Looking back, perhaps the biggest missed opportunity was a failure to focus on automating the move. If SAP had treated migration as a “moonshot” to automate the transition for that remaining 50% of legacy customers, the landscape would look very different today. Instead, we have a massive “wait and see” group. For these organizations, existing ERP systems serve their needs perfectly well, and a major upheaval without a clear, automated path or undeniable business value is simply not a priority.

Even with the 2027 (mainstream) 2030/2033 (extended) deadlines looming, many in the “wait and see” camp believe these dates are a “false flag”. They are waiting to see who blinks first. This suggests a likely move from SAP will not be a hard sunset, but rather a “carrot and a stick” approach:

• The carrot: An extension of maintenance programs for customers who commit to a migration roadmap – and we see this today already with options including SAP RISE ECC on SQL Server with Azure and Cloud Safekeeper – both allowing the customer to make a cloud commitment now and extend existing system support deadlines considerably.
• The stick: A strategic adjustment of support costs. Rather than “harsh penalties,” SAP may offer “forgiveness on support” in exchange for signing a Cloud ERP contract, effectively converting legacy maintenance revenue into the annual recurring revenue SAP targets. The first example of this may be the SAP Cloud ERP Private Edition Transition Option. Under this plan, an existing customer makes a Cloud ERP commitment and adopts a Max Success plan beginning in 2026, with extended support coverage for 2031-2033.

Specialized editions such as Power 9, Customer Data Center Edition or Azure ECC on SQL Server extend these options for enterprises with specific technical or workload requirements. The proliferation of models addresses the fact that every customer is at a different point in their journey due to diverse legacies from implementations, upgrades, and M&A activities.

Cloud ERP outlook

As said in the first edition of this FAQ, Cloud ERP began primarily to move customers to S/4HANA, and now to Cloud Services. This helps SAP with the dual goals of moving revenue to cloud services vs. traditional software licensing and ultimately driving new technology adoption.

This can be very good for SAP customers over time, despite the cost and complexity of migration and end of support woes. Clean(er) Core, elastic capacity and the ease of adopting AI technologies through service consumption are all positive outcomes of the move. For many customers, getting out of the self-hosting and datacenter operations running SAP to focus on what they really do will be a big positive, lowering the TCO of ERP systems and operations.

A truly “Clean Core” customer is also one that’s more portable and much more able to make a non-SAP choice at some point in the future. By removing deep customizations, customers are no longer trapped by their own legacy code. Such customers are both more valuable in the form of lower costs to maintain, yet more critical to maintain for SAP given their portability – a true win/win for both parties.

The ERP Migration Countdown (2026 – 2033)

Reach out to your local Avantra expert for an informal chat and demo – we would be happy to show you how Avantra has helped the Cloud ERP transition of dozens of organizations already, and why a “better together” approach is the future-proof way.