SAP is making progress with its cloud and AI strategy with customers as enterprises are allocating more budget to S/4HANA Cloud.
That's the high-level takeaway from the latest investment survey from the German-speaking SAP User Group (DSAG). The survey incorporates responses from DSAG members as well as large enterprises that aren't part of the group.
The results were released at the DSAG Annual Congress.
SAP has fleshed out its Business Suite strategy, role of AI and agents as well as migration plans as it prods customers to move to the cloud and a clean data core. DSAG found that 47% of respondents are increasing SAP budgets, up from 46% a year ago.
Yet, there is a good bit of flux. Twenty-three percent of respondents said the SAP budget remains unchanged and 25% said budgets were decreasing, up from 19% a year ago.
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Jens Hungershausen, DSAG Chairman of the Board, noted that companies are clearly reviewing SAP budgets, but there are multiple factors a play. "Possible reasons could be delays in planned migrations, savings through consolidation of SAP systems or a general reduction in costs," he said.
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Among the key takeaways from the DSAG Investment Report 2025:
- The use of S/4HANA Private Cloud and S/4HANA Public Cloud is seeing growth. Thirty-three percent of enterprises use S/4HANA Private Cloud, up from 11% a year ago, and 13% use S/4HANA Public Cloud, up from 6% a year ago.
- 42% of enterprises are on S4/HANA on-premises.
- 68% of respondents are planning to invest in S/4HANA Cloud. DSAG noted that the structure of the survey and more large enterprises likely boosted the results.
- 38% of respondents had a positive view of the S/4HANA cloud strategy, up from 13% a year ago.
- 48% of enterprises surveyed are using or plan to use the RISE with SAP program.
- Business Technology Platform is getting the most investment with 40% saying it will get high and medium investments. SAP SuccessFactors was cited by 25% with Signavio at 18%.
"SAP hasn't found the silver bullet to solve it's upgrade problem. Whole AI helped earlier in the year, and it is now back to packaging. The crux remains - S/4HANA does not have the automatic advantages to self entice customers to upgrade. We will see where SAP ends up in 2025," said Holger Mueller, an analyst at Constellation Research.
