Dig­i­ti­za­tion is matur­ing among DSAG (Ger­man-speak­ing SAP user group) mem­bers, but S/4HANA and SAP Leonar­do still have plen­ty of room to grow, accord­ing to a sur­vey of 334 DSAG mem­ber com­pa­nies released this week. The exam­i­na­tion of IT invest­ments found that 40 per­cent of sur­veyed com­pa­nies are invest­ing more in tech­nol­o­gy, with IT bud­gets at those orga­ni­za­tions ris­ing 17 per­cent on aver­age. SAP col­lect­ed a nice chunk of that mon­ey, with 37 per­cent of new spend­ing head­ing to the Ger­man-based soft­ware vendor. 

DSAG mem­bers in the study are far­ther along in their dig­i­ti­za­tion jour­neys, with 44 per­cent say­ing they have made good or very good progress. That’s up from 31 per­cent in a sum­mer 2017 sur­vey. That dig­i­ti­za­tion isn’t nec­es­sar­i­ly dig­i­tal trans­for­ma­tion, how­ev­er, as 85 per­cent of those sur­veyed said their com­pa­nies are invest­ing in dig­i­tiz­ing exist­ing busi­ness process­es. That num­ber rep­re­sents a 30 per­cent rise from one year ago. 

“For DSAG mem­bers, the dig­i­ti­za­tion of exist­ing busi­ness process­es con­tin­ues to be more impor­tant than invest­ing in new busi­ness mod­els, although both have seen growth,” said DSAG Chair­man Mar­co Lenck in a press release. 

All is not lost on the trans­for­ma­tion front. Two-thirds of those sur­veyed con­sid­er invest­ments in new busi­ness mod­els as impor­tant or very important. 

SAP S/4HANA and SAP Leonar­do: Plen­ty of Room to Grow

At SAP TechEd 2017 in Las Vegas, SAP cel­e­brat­ed the 1000-live cus­tomer mile­stone for SAP S/4HANA, but DSAG’s sur­vey results reveal that at least among its mem­ber­ship, instal­la­tions are still hard to find. Just three per­cent indi­cat­ed hav­ing already imple­ment­ed SAP S/4HANA, a one per­cent rise from the year pri­or. Look­ing ahead, five per­cent of those sur­veyed said they will imple­ment SAP S/4HANA in the next year while one-third will imple­ment it in the next three years. 

Check out this ASUG web­cast on a startup’s 14-week S/4HANA implementation. 

SAP bills SAP S/4HANA as its ​“dig­i­tal core” and the vendor’s mar­ket­ed path to dig­i­tal trans­for­ma­tion and imple­ment­ing new tech­nolo­gies is SAP Leonar­do. The prod­uct, which is a set of ser­vices and soft­ware, was launched one year ago and is just start­ing to pick up steam with the SAP cus­tomer base — large­ly because SAP is only now start­ing to hone the mes­sage around it. Still, there is a long way to go, as just two per­cent of those sur­veyed are using SAP Leonar­do ser­vices and tech­nolo­gies. Anoth­er 10 per­cent say they plan to deploy SAP Leonar­do in 2018. 

The good news for SAP is that almost half of those com­pa­nies sur­veyed indi­cat­ed they are express­ing inter­est­ed in SAP Leonar­do. The mar­ket­ing push is work­ing at least in terms of build­ing aware­ness, now it will be up to SAP to pro­vide con­crete cus­tomer sto­ries to con­vert that aware­ness to sales. 

See what SAP Leonar­do is doing in the man­u­fac­tur­ing space in this ASUG webcast. 

SAP Busi­ness Suite Invest­ment Declining 

The pre­de­ces­sor to SAP S/4HANA, SAP Busi­ness Suite, still vast­ly out­num­bers the new kid on the block in instal­la­tions. With rel­a­tive­ly few SAP S/4HANA cus­tomers live, it should come as no sur­prise that SAP Busi­ness Suite is still rel­e­vant — even with the cur­rent 2025 end of main­stream main­te­nance date loom­ing for SAP’s lega­cy ERP. 

Almost half — 48 per­cent — of DSAG respon­dents are still invest­ing in SAP Busi­ness Suite. How­ev­er, that is a 10 per­cent drop from a sim­i­lar sur­vey in Fall of 2017. Inter­est­ing­ly, SAP S/4HANA invest­ment stayed flat. 

Per­haps DSAG mem­bers aren’t ready just yet to migrate to SAP S/4HANA (or an SAP com­peti­tor), but they know change is on the hori­zon and few­er com­pa­nies are see­ing a need to invest fur­ther cap­i­tal into SAP Busi­ness Suite.

Hear from ASUG mem­ber Sno­homish PUD about its Busi­ness Suite on HANA imple­men­ta­tion. 

Bot­tom Line for ASUG Members 

It’s not pru­dent to take num­bers from DSAG and project them onto ASUG’s mem­ber­ship — the two mar­kets are dif­fer­ent in the way they invest enter­prise soft­ware bud­gets, par­tic­u­lar­ly in the area of cloud. How­ev­er, SAP cus­tomers all around the world are still using the same soft­ware, and it is inter­est­ing to see where trends are heading. 

ASUG mem­bers may feel the pinch from SAP when it comes to mov­ing to SAP S/4HANA — that 2025 date is creep­ing ever clos­er. They may find some relief when look­ing at results like this, know­ing that SAP S/4HANA adop­tion is still years off at most com­pa­nies, and some have only begun prepar­ing by lim­it­ing their invest­ment in lega­cy software. 

As for SAP Leonar­do, it seems like DSAG’s mem­ber­ship aligns well with ASUG — they know it exists, they are curi­ous about it, but adop­tion is still not on the table for most companies.