Turning Complexity into Clarity: How RHONDOS and PowerConnect Guide SAP Customers Through Cloud Migration Chaos
This article was authored by Brian Bates, Senior Director of GTM Strategy at RHONDOS.
While waiting at the airport, I overheard a spirited discussion between two SAP customers debating the merits and challenges of transitioning to the cloud with RISE with SAP. Their concerns—overcomplex toolchains, opaque licensing, and hidden integration costs—aren’t just airport chatter. They reflect real tensions across SAP landscapes. So, how can customers cut through the confusion and regain control? Intrigued, I delved into these topics to provide clarity and insights.
Navigating the RISE with SAP Landscape: Addressing Common Concerns
Complexity in Migration Toolchains and Batch Job Orchestration
The transition to RISE with SAP involves a suite of tools designed to facilitate the migration process. SAP offers an integrated toolchain, including the SAP Cloud ALM, to support business transformation journeys. These tools aim to increase productivity, ensure high quality, and foster effective collaboration.
SAP's recommended toolchain for migration
As a conceptual design, the integrated toolchain offers very impressive capabilities. These include integrations with SAP Signavio as the main driver for business process optimization, SAP LeanIX as the architectural oversight, and Tricentis Test Automation for SAP, offering sophisticated test automation, ensuring a clean shift (link).
However, some users have reported challenges with long-running data migration jobs. SAP acknowledges these issues and provides guidance on troubleshooting and optimizing data migration processes (link).
The integrated toolchain also consists of many capabilities that require customer training and upskilling, which can be lengthy and confusing. Cloud migrations are significant investments for ERP operations and typically expose brittle business processes and integrations.
Ultimately, comprehensive supply chain observability isn't an out-of-the-box feature of this toolchain.
Deciphering the Licensing Model: Are Customers Paying Three Times?
The licensing model under RISE with SAP has evolved, leading to the surprising (and spirited) conversation at the terminal about potential triple charges (link).
User-Based Licensing: SAP employs the Full Usage Equivalent (FUE) model, assigning weights to different user roles based on their system usage. For instance, a developer access is weighted at 0.5 FUE, while core use is weighted at 5.0 FUE.
Digital Access (Indirect Use): This pertains to non-SAP interactions with S/4HANA through APIs, including third-party applications and integrations. SAP charges based on the number of documents created or processed by the system, regardless of the direct or indirect origin.
Integration Volume: While SAP provides access to a growing library of prebuilt integrations, there are limits. For example, the SAP Integration Suite includes 50,000 messages per month, with additional messages available for purchase.
But wait, there's more!
Depending on the business, LOB-specific add-ons can be purchased in addition to the core ERP. And then, the infrastructure can be "pseudo-tailored" to the implementation. This is a huge gap in customer awareness - it never came up at the airport. SAP offers "T-shirt" sizing for infrastructure, and many basis-level tools to assess performance are missing from the cloud tools, making decisions difficult on how to manage. The missing question is, do we fine-tune or scale up to the next size?
These components can lead to perceptions of being charged multiple times, especially when integrating various systems and users during the migration.
Conclusion
Transitioning to RISE with SAP offers numerous benefits, including streamlined processes and access to advanced tools. While it's essential for businesses to thoroughly understand the migration tools and licensing structures to make informed decisions, these technology projects serve the business.
Business leaders must engage with business transformation projects and investigate how the supply chain is impacted.
Enter: RHONDOS + PowerConnect.
Visibility into Batch Jobs and Orchestration: Taming the Toolchain Beast
The Challenge: SAP migrations often introduce a sprawl of tools—some cloud-native, some legacy—and managing batch jobs across them becomes brittle and opaque.
Batch job observability shown in Dynatrace
How RHONDOS Helps:
PowerConnect delivers real-time telemetry from SAP workloads directly into observability platforms like Splunk, Dynatrace, and Elastic.
Customers get end-to-end traceability of job performance, failures, and system dependencies, regardless of where the job runs—on-prem or in the cloud.
This reduces mean time to resolution (MTTR) and ensures migration jobs don’t silently fail or misfire under the radar.
You can correlate SAP logs with infrastructure metrics and network traces in Splunk, Dynatrace, or Elastic—unifying your visibility across the hybrid supply chain technology landscape.
Decode Licensing and Integration Sprawl: No More Black Box Billing
The Challenge: SAP’s licensing under RISE often feels like a three-headed monster:
Per-user charges via FUE.
Indirect access via document creation.
Message volume from integrations.
SAP API Management shown in Splunk
How RHONDOS Helps:
PowerConnect for SAP provides quantitative insights into actual SAP usage patterns:
This data lets you model real vs. projected license usage, helping teams contest or renegotiate SAP terms with hard numbers.
PowerConnect gives you evidence—not estimates—for license audits and capacity planning.
Proactive Risk Mitigation: Stay Ahead of Performance and Security Pitfalls
The Challenge: Migrating SAP workloads to the cloud introduces unknowns—performance bottlenecks, compliance gaps, and security exposure from new integrations.
IDOC to Business Object monitoring shown in Splunk
How RHONDOS Helps:
PowerConnect surfaces performance anomalies, security events, and compliance deviations in near real-time.
Integrated with alerting and dashboards, IT teams can take proactive action, not just react to incidents.
Helps maintain audit readiness in regulated industries like finance, healthcare, or government.
Think of RHONDOS as your mission control for SAP resilience—especially during risky transitions.
White Glove Expertise: You’re Not in This Alone
The Challenge: Migration toolchains are not only complex—they’re unique to every customer.
How RHONDOS Helps:
RHONDOS offers guided trial programs and SAP-certified expert support to co-pilot deployments.
Whether you're pre-migration or in steady-state operations, we ensure you understand your telemetry, optimize it, and operationalize it.
Our support team doesn’t just install and run—they coach you to maturity.
Final Thoughts from the Terminal
If you’re grappling with the confusion around RISE with SAP, know this: you’re not alone, and you’re not powerless. RHONDOS and PowerConnect empower SAP customers with transparency, insight, and control—exactly what you need when navigating the fog of cloud transformation.
Want to see PowerConnect in action? Reach out for a live demo or trial with one of our SAP-certified specialists.
Brian Bates
RHONDOS
+1 503-751-2233
bbates@rhondos.com
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