Digitization beyond processes

The "Application Management in Europe" study provides insight into the status quo and future developments in the area of SAP application management. For this study, PAC analysts surveyed executives from major SAP IT companies across Europe.

For 96 percent of respondents, their own SAP landscape represents a challenge due to the high degree of customization and adjustments made.

Additionally, since a large percentage of enterprises use or will use many different cloud applications and delivery models in parallel, this results in complex integration and management of these solutions.

For 91 percent of respondents, the complexity of hybrid IT landscapes is a challenge. Such hybrid IT landscapes often include legacy IT, private and public cloud models, as well as independently operated and (out)sourced infrastructures.

All of this requires consistent end-to-end governance, compliance and security across a variety of different applications and infrastructure platforms.

The "older" ERP systems (R/3, ERP/ECC 6.0) are still the most widespread. A large proportion of respondents (49 percent) also currently operate an SAP CRM solution.

But cloud applications have also become commonplace for many of the respondents. A large number (39 percent) say they have implemented the cloud variant of SAP's new ERP suite S/4.

56 percent said they were already using SAP Cloud Platform and SAP Leonardo or planned to use them. For SAP Analytics Cloud, the figure is 53 percent.

Many companies also use solutions to support separate processes, such as Ariba for purchasing and procurement (63 percent) or SuccessFactors for human capital management (77 percent).

In recent years, cost pressure in particular, but also staff shortages within Europe, have led to increased demand for services from offshoring and nearshoring locations.

Accordingly, 79 percent of the study participants said they would use nearshore resources. Offshoring is used by 69 percent of the companies.

However, the experience with nearshoring seems to be more positive: 46 percent of the companies that use nearshore resources are convinced that this proportion will increase in the coming years. Offshoring and nearshoring are facing increasing competition from automation.

41 percent of participants already use automation or artificial intelligence (AI)-based technologies to manage their SAP systems, or plan to do so. At the same time, 46 percent are interested in using these technologies in their organization.