Thinkstock SAP is promising to lower the cost of licensing, maintaining and hosting its core ERP applications by taking on all those tasks for a single subscription fee — a sort of digital transformation as a service, as CEO Christian Klein described it. Enterprises taking up the offer, called “Rise with SAP,” will no longer pay separate licensing and maintenance fees, and their applications will be hosted by SAP in its own cloud rather than on premises or elsewhere. Klein unveiled the offering on January 27, saying it would be generally available the next day. While it sounds like a good deal if all goes smoothly, enterprises need to have a clear idea how they can get their applications back on premises, or at least under their control, if things don’t work out in the cloud for some reason, said Thomas Henzler, licenses and maintenance director for the German-speaking SAP User Group, DSAG.