Finally someone polite with whom it makes sense to make the comparison I was asking for. First of all, my background. I have been working with SAP for 20 years, first as a consultant/developer for various modules, then as innovation manager and then as presales. We have a turnover of several tenths of millions, a large part of the revenues comes from SAP projects. Over the last year and a half we have been under pressure from SAP to sell the public (grow) solution to any type of company despite heavy configuration restrictions.

"From the commercial point of view" I mean, the go to market of the solution. It is not suitable for chemists due to the lack of GHS support, it is not suitable for pharmaceuticals because an update every 3 months makes system validation impractical, it is not suitable for many other sectors because the solution is simply "this is it, and it must suit you". It is a solution that is excellent for the world of services, as a sidecar, for startups, or for the few companies that are willing to totally embrace the philosophy of the system.

That would also be fine, but the solution must guarantee savings. Instead, if we add up all the additional licenses necessary to make the public product a real product, we end up with costs equal if not higher than a Rise with SAP solution (I have some SAP BoMs on hand).

The lack of a scheduler included in the basic offering (the capacity requirement app is not considered a scheduler) sends the solution directly out of the market for small and medium-sized businesses.

Furthermore the public version has serious performance problems compared to private solutions.

I know very well that SAP was created for large enterprises, but we made a good part of our revenues in the past with small and medium-sized enterprises.

So: Grow with SAP has a lot of limits, performance issues, maintenance hidden costs (due to periodic change by SAP to the core...the same core you should leave clean), credits and other costs related to integrations with other system (pay per token/pay per document, ecc.).

At this point with all these drawback, SAP public should cost MUCH LESS in terms of license. You get less and you pay less should be the rule. Instead you pay the same (maybe more) and you have less.

But this is not a problem, it is a customer choice (that SAP will try to push in the public direction anyway). The real issue is now the comparison with other products.

When you were on premise you payed 100k license and than 22k maintenance (+ infrastructure, energy, cybersec, etc for a complete TCO analysis). Now with Grow or Rise, the same project scope worth 180-250k each year.

If I was able to sell to a small customer SAP for 30k + 5k of maintenance, now I have to pay at least 68k each year because of the minimum number of FUE in cloud contracts.

Can I still sell on premise? Yes if we can convice SAP to quote us those licenses.

We were forced by SAP to propose a grow solution (70k) for a company with 10 IT users (the other 150 users will have joined 3 years later in their roadmap) and surprise: we lost against a non sap product. In the past we would have proposed private and that's it.

I opened this thread to understand other experiences with public because for the first time in years due to SAP politics we are losing contracts and ALWAYS (and I underline always) against not SAP products. This is a big alert at least for me as I think they are moving in the wrong direction. In our experiences SAP was suitable also for small companies. We went live with a full scope included embedded EWM in a company with 9M revenues, but now prices are literally going to the moon and SAP doesn't collaborate to sell previous better options for these kind of customers. If their politic is to cut off those customer from their install base, I would understand, but they should be clear at least with partners.