RISE, SOAR, And Then…?

I can see the value in a program like RISE with SAP, from at least one perspective: giving customers one neck to choke that covers both software and cloud infra/platform licensing. Lots of new SAP customers are choosing it – though I don’t know if existing customers upgrading to S/4HANA are going along with RISE to the degree that SAP would like.

What I didn’t know about RISE until Sapphire was that Accenture has a complementary program, called “SOAR with Accenture”. Since it’s not a competitor for RISE, I got curious to find out exactly what SOAR is. Here are some facts:

• SOAR has a “move your business to the cloud” feel similar to RISE.
• In Accenture’s words, SOAR “brings pre-configured industry solutions, business process models, extensibility architectures, end-to-end delivery capabilities, cloud-native technologies, and industry cloud solutions all driven and delivered by Accenture myConcerto.”
• I feel like descriptions like the one above are word-dense but information-sparse. I can’t really tell what SOAR means from that.
• myConcerto is an “insight-driven, digitally integrated platform that orchestrates the power of new SAP solutions and technologies, and Accenture’s industry and functional expertise to create exponential business outcomes.”
• Word-dense, information-sparse.

I feel like sometimes I miss the point of big consulting firms’ programs. Maybe it’s my engineer side looking for a concise, packaged-up thing, when those companies are in the business of selling ideas tied to person-hours of labor.

SOAR has the same problem that I outlined with the general SAP Sapphire keynotes: if you don’t tell a story, you start to lose me. I can’t find SOAR customer stories on Accenture’s website, so until I can hear someone outside of Accenture tell me what they actually got, I remain in the dark. PM

Don’t miss our latest issue!