RISE For SAP Could Be A Boon For IBM’s PowerVS Cloud

March 17, 2025 Timothy Prickett Morgan

German application giant System Analyse Programmentwicklung, better known as SAP, has spent more than five decades to deliver five major versions of application software to help companies run themselves. They are R/1 in 1977, R/2 in 1981, R/3 in 1992, mySAP.com (which became Business Suite) in 1999, SAP HANA in 2011 with its S/4HANA application suite in 2015. And today, the company has over 400,000 customers.

As is well known, SAP wants to create an application system, which is a phrase that resonates with the OS/400 and IBM i faithful. SAP was founded by five ex-IBMers from Germany and started out supporting its applications on IBM mainframes, but eventually ported its software to Unix servers (often using the Oracle database, but sometimes IBM’s Db2 or others) and then Windows NT (usually running SQL Server, but sometimes Oracle or other databases) and then finally Linux systems running Oracle, Db2, and other databases.

Oracle wanted more of the enterprise software pie and developed its own application suites and then bought the JD Edwards, PeopleSoft, and Siebel Systems application stacks, among others, to take on SAP. And SAP retaliated in kind by moving down into databases and middleware. To a certain extent, the HANA in-memory database has been about SAP completely owning its software stack, and SAP has been on a mission for the past decade and a half to move customers to its HANA database and then the S/4HANA application stack that followed it to market. And then, with the RISE with SAP program, the company has additionally told customers that SAP wants to move them not only to its own in-memory database, but also to cloud infrastructure (as opposed to on-premises infrastructure) with a strategy called “RISE with SAP.”

The idea behind rise is to bungle together the SAP application and systems software, cloud infrastructure to run it, and system integration and programming services to customize it for specific businesses. You sign one contract with SAP to get the whole shebang, which also shifts from perpetual licenses for the SAP software (usually Business Suite but often called ERP Central Component or ECC) to subscriptions for both the hardware and software (in this case, HANA and S/4HANA). SAP has its own cloud infrastructure for RISE, with 57 datacenters in 32 locations in 15 countries, and it also partners with Amazon Web Services, Microsoft Azure, Google Cloud, T-Systems (the cloud arm of T-Mobile, the mobile phone company of Deutsche Telekom), and Alibaba Cloud. (There could be others, but those are the ones we could find.)

The Power Virtual Server portion of the IBM Cloud is also keen on benefitting on the RISE with SAP effort, not the least of which because SAP HANA has been such a big driver of on-premises Power Systems sales in the Power8, Power9, and Power10 eras. If SAP moves everybody to a cloud and subscriptions and IBM does not have a Power Systems cloud, then it cannot make any SAP HANA and S/4HANA money.

So, now you know why IBM finally got serious about Power Systems in the cloud a few years ago.

IBM itself is one of the largest and most famous users of SAP application software, and IBM’s own IT operations was one of the first customers that has been put through the RISE on IBM Power Virtual Server transformation process, which it talked about way back in January and which we discussed with Power Systems general manager Tom McPherson. (We talked to McPherson soon after he took over running Power Systems, specifically back in November 2023, to get a sense what was going on in the business and where he would be steering it.)

Under this program, IBM moved its quote-to-cash and record-to-report processes from Business Suite to RISE with SAP, using its own Power Virtual Server as the cloud to host the HANA database and subset of the S/4HANA applications. IBM has over 150,000 end users in 175 countries for these two application modules, so this was not a small project. In fact it took 18 months to roll everyone over to the new apps. The RISE transformation was done by IBM Consulting, and when it was done, IBM shaved off 30 percent in infrastructure costs by moving to the PowerVS cloud backed by Power Systems. (We presume this was done on fairly large Power10 iron with a big memory footprint.)

Big Blue has said in the past that there are over 10,000 customers that run SAP applications on IBM systems, which includes System z mainframes and Power Systems, and we also think this number includes those who ran on System x machinery. Back in May 2022, Steve Sibley told us there were more than 3,000 customers running HANA on Power, and that number has only grown since then. There were 1,500 customers running SAP Business Suite natively on IBM i and its Db2 for i relational database, and as far as we know, there is no plan to offer a native SAP HANA inside of a Linux partition running inside of IBM i. (There would not be much point in it, really.) McPherson tells The Four Hundred that IBM has over 10,000 customers running Power systems running SAP applications on premises.

“And now we are giving them an optimized path, lower risk, faster migration, to move from HANA on premises to Power in the cloud within 90 days for the part of your estate you want to move,” says McPherson. “We’re really designing this to be the fastest, easiest path to the cloud for Power Systems running SAP workloads, and the architectural consistency helps that fast path. The familiarity with Power helps that fast path, so it’s set up to be like a frictionless highway for ERP modernization for Power clients running SAP. Our strategy is to meet clients where they are on their journey to RISE for SAP, and they can go at the pace they want to go.”

And, they get to stay on the Power platform on a cloud managed by IBM, too. Which is a whole lot less change than moving to X86 iron running on one of the larger clouds.

Just like SAP HANA and then S/4HANA have been a boon to on premises Power Systems sales in the past decade, it could turn on that RISE for HANA could be a boon for PowerVS, which is of course base don IBM’s Power Systems machinery, but sold as cloud capacity, not installed on premises. Time will tell.

This Issue Sponsored By

Table of Contents

Content archive

Recent Posts

Subscribe

Pages

Search