If you’ve ever felt a chill run down your spine after reading your hyperscaler invoice, you’re not alone. SAP in the Cloud brings flexibility, scale, and innovation—but it also brings cost complexity. At our latest Lemongrass Live session, we took a guided tour through the past, present, and future of SAP FinOps, sharing practical ways organisations can bring predictability, transparency, and value to their Cloud ERP investments.
It’s a journey that’s part war story, part strategy session—and one every SAP leader should hear.
The Ghost of FinOps Past: The Early Days of Cloud SAP
Let’s rewind to 2015. SAP workloads were just starting to move into the Cloud, often lifted directly onto oversized virtual machines with little consideration for architecture or optimization. At the time, Cloud infrastructure was typically bought like hardware—big and upfront. Reserved instances and savings plans offered new ways to reduce spend, but without a FinOps discipline in place, many organizations ended up overprovisioned and overspending.
Lemongrass has worked with many customers to correct those early missteps. One fashion brand we supported had inherited a costly, under-optimized SAP landscape from a previous partner. By reconfiguring their HANA systems, introducing scheduling for non-prod environments, and removing unused storage, we helped them cut costs to a third of what they were previously spending.
Even now, there are savings to be found—though they tend to be more nuanced. In one case, we worked with a major hotel chain to reconfigure backup storage strategies. The result? A projected annual saving of over 80K by shifting to smarter tiering and removing redundant backup volumes.
The Ghost of FinOps Present: Welcome to the New World of Licensing
Today, FinOps is no longer just about infrastructure. The shift to RISE with SAP and Private Cloud Editions means customers are navigating a fundamentally different commercial landscape—where licensing, infrastructure, and contract models are tightly intertwined.
Where once you paid upfront for perpetual licences and annual maintenance, Cloud ERP now operates on a monthly subscription model, often tied to consumption metrics.
This has two critical implications:
- Your infrastructure and your licensing costs now influence each other. Scale one up, and you could be triggering additional charges in the other.
- You’re negotiating with a single vendor—SAP—on both licensing and infrastructure, making preparation and strategy more important than ever.
FinOps maturity is essential here. As we discussed during the session, getting your licensing strategy right before signing a contract can significantly reduce long-term risk. One Lemongrass customer did just that—conducting a full financial and licensing review before committing to RISE. The result? Greater confidence in their roadmap, additional SAP services, and a £2 million saving through smarter licence modelling. That’s the power of FinOps done right.
The Ghost of FinOps Yet to Come: Optimising for Outcomes
So, what does the future hold?
As SAP evolves toward SaaS-first, public Cloud-native delivery, many of today’s levers—like tweaking virtual machines or managing reserved instances—will become obsolete. Instead, organisations will need to focus on optimising outcomes.
Here’s what we expect to see in the coming years:
- Shadow metering and sidecar tools: As customization moves into BTP, usage will be measured differently—by functional events and API calls, not infrastructure hours.
- Predictive licensing tools: AI will help forecast future usage, automate internal cost allocation, and reduce the administrative load of monthly reconciliations.
- Contracts built around value: Instead of buying tools, customers will increasingly pay for outcomes—like improved stock accuracy or faster financial close cycles.
- Resale and flexibility: Expect to see smarter contracting with buffer ranges, usage flexibility, and even secondary marketplaces for unused services.
- Sustainability metrics: Leading organizations are already tracking carbon cost alongside financial cost—and this will only grow in importance.
In short, FinOps will move higher up the stack—from optimizing infrastructure to influencing business performance.
Where to Begin? A Practical Path Forward
The FinOps landscape can feel complex, especially when SAP licensing, hyperscaler models, and shifting contract terms are all changing at once.
But there is a path forward:
- Start with analysis – Understand your current FinOps maturity across infrastructure, licensing, and tooling.
- Automate where possible – Manual licence tracking won’t scale. Invest in the right tools to monitor and manage consumption.
- Scale gradually – Start small, prove value, and build from there.
- Industrialize the model – Align your FinOps approach across departments and geographies for ongoing transparency and control.
And above all: get expert guidance early. Whether you’re planning a move to RISE, rethinking your licensing, or just trying to get more value from your Cloud ERP, don’t wait until you’re locked into a model that doesn’t fit.
