SAP offers AI to all Rise customers — in unknown, varying amounts

“That was expected to come at some point,” he said. “Ideally, they want customers to move to the public cloud edition, because that completely locks down customization and works towards their goal of what they call ‘clean core,’ which is to basically have the same core ERP instance across all of their customers, with traditional legacy customizations and differentiation and functionality to be accommodated through use of APIs and their Business Technology Platform. That way your customizations — or extensions, as SAP calls them — are now abstracted away from the core. They can keep that data clean, and clean data, and lots of it, are going to be the drivers for a lot of the AI capabilities to potentially add value.

“What they don’t tell you here — and the devil’s in the details — is exactly what capabilities you would get with the Premium edition of Rise versus the Premium Plus.”

That raises the question of what customers can do with Joule in each tier. And that, Bickley said, is a complaint that a lot of analysts have had coming back from the company’s user conference, Sapphire, as well.