SAP's BTP: The Other Side of the S/4HANA Coin

Many IT Sourcing and Procurement veterans, or those responsible for technology acquisition, will be caught unawares when they execute their S/4HANA contracts or when their already executed contracts come back to haunt them. Most SAP agreements for S/4HANA have at least a small part of the BOM allocated to functionality provisioned under the SAP Business Technology Platform (BTP). What most of these organizations do not realize is that the old ways of procuring SAP functionality under a defined user license or subscription have been subsumed by a new consumption-based model, the results of which will not be felt until the paltry allocation of BTP credits is consumed, leaving IT and the business hungry for more … but at what unbudgeted and forecasted (or unforecasted) cost?