Corporate IT investments rise again after Corona

As far as IT investments are concerned, companies in Germany, Austria and Switzerland are abandoning their restraint of the past two years, which were dominated by the Corona pandemic. In the DSAG Investment Report 2022, 59% report that their overall IT budget is higher than in the previous year. In the 2021 survey, this figure was only 39%. Only 5% of the companies surveyed report declining IT investments (2021: 18%).

“It can be seen from these figures that the consequences of the Corona crisis will probably have been overcome in 2022, or at least that they will be significantly less influential. The investment backlog of the last two years seems to be dissipating. What was still only developing very cautiously in 2021 will pick up speed due to the relaunch of projects or the necessity of transformation efforts,” says DSAG Chairman Jens Hungershausen.

Investments in SAP S/4HANA are clearly gaining in relevance

SAP S/4HANA catches up with SAP ERP

The DSAG Investment Report 2022 also determined which ERP solutions from SAP companies are currently using. SAP ERP or SAP Business Suite is the most widely used (75%), followed by SAP S/4HANA on-premise (32%). From the private cloud, 6% of companies obtain SAP S/4HANA, from the public cloud only 2%. Compared to the previous year, the proportion of companies using SAP S/4HANA has increased by a whopping 18%.

The various ERP systems also have their share of planned IT investments. For SAP Business Suite, 6% of companies are planning high investments and 18% medium investments. For SAP S/4HANA, 26% are planning high investments and 24% medium investments. What is striking is that the figures for SAP S/4HANA have hardly changed compared to 2021.

Investments in SAP cloud solutions

Among SAP cloud solutions, SAP SuccessFactors has the greatest relevance for high or medium investments (21%), followed by SAP Customer Experience (CX) and SAP Ariba (9% each). Within the SAP CX portfolio, companies are investing primarily in SAP Commerce Cloud (37%), SAP Sales Cloud (27%) and SAP Service Cloud (17%).

With regard to SAP Business Technology Platform, investments are primarily directed at the analytics solutions available there (20%) and the solutions for data and database management (19%). The topics of application development and integration (11%) and intelligent technologies (4%) are less relevant in this context.

Cyber security with greatest relevance

Beyond the SAP cosmos, cyber security has medium to high relevance for investment planning for 78% of companies, making it the dominant topic. Also mentioned were process automation (66%), digital competence and remote work (55% each), and sustainability (48%). Investments in innovative technologies are distributed primarily among data intelligence/big data (35%), cloud computing (26%) and robotic process automation (15%). Compared with the previous year, the values have fallen slightly across the board – possibly an effect of the investment backlog during the Corona years.