PAC compares services providers in its latest RADAR on SAP services in Europe and Germany

Munich, February 7, 2024 – The demand for SAP services remains very high. For most companies, the migration to SAP S/4HANA is still outstanding while the end of standard maintenance for SAP ECC, scheduled for 2027, is approaching. At the same time, companies have to decide on their future direction with regard to issues such as their deployment model (private cloud, public cloud) or process modernization. Against this background, the PAC RADAR “SAP Services in Europe and Germany 2024” helps companies choose the right provider.

For this year’s PAC RADAR “SAP Services in Europe and Germany 2024”, PAC did an in-depth analysis of 24 leading services providers, evaluating them in 16 different RADAR segments according to about 100 individual criteria. The results are presented in RADAR graphs (see sample graph for SAP S/4HANA-related services) that provide a quick overview of the relevant players. The IT services providers evaluated in the PAC RADAR series on SAP services in Europe and Germany 2024 include, for example, BTC, DXC, Eviden, Reply and T-Systems.

Services providers have increased the number of their consultants

The services providers assessed in this PAC RADAR series account for nearly 50% of SAP services market volume in the EMEA region. They are part of a very heterogeneous vendor landscape ranging from well-established international services providers with tens of thousands of certified SAP consultants worldwide and substantial offshore and nearshore capabilities to Germany-focused providers with a few hundred, mainly domestic, SAP experts. Almost all providers in this year’s analysis consider themselves to be full-service providers. However, the RADAR analysis shows that there are some vendors with a focus on infrastructure services (e.g., hosting) or on SMB clients.

“The services providers have substantially increased their SAP-related resources over the past few years. The analysis of the RADAR data shows that the number of trained SAP experts grew by an average of more than 25% globally between 2021 and 2023,” says Joachim Hackmann, Principal Analyst and Head of the BAS Practice at PAC. “Resources in Europe and Germany expanded to a slightly lesser extent, which suggests that providers invested more heavily in the expansion of nearshore and offshore resources”.

A changing vendor landscape for hosting services

The fact that SAP, with programs such as RISE with SAP, is pushing its customers to switch to cloud-based deployment models is giving a boost to those hosting services that are based on the major hyperscale public clouds (AWS, Microsoft Azure, and Google Cloud). “The strong demand for public cloud migrations has had a massive impact on the competitive landscape in the SAP hosting space. Established hosting providers as well as systems integrators, which used to be positioned in the C&SI and AM services markets in the past, offer end-to-end SAP operations, i.e., a combination of cloud management and SAP operations”, points out Karsten Leclerque, Principal Analyst and Head of the Infrastructure & Cloud Services Practice at PAC. “Still, not all SAP systems by far will be migrated to public cloud platforms. Private, or at least hybrid, architectures will remain highly relevant”.

The new PAC RADAR series

The PAC RADAR is an effective tool for the holistic evaluation and visual positioning of software vendors and IT services providers on local markets. With the help of predefined criteria, PAC evaluates and compares providers’ strategies, development, and market position, in addition to their performance and competencies within specific market segments. Each PAC RADAR focuses on a specific IT market segment, such as SAP Consulting & Systems Integration, SAP Application Management, SAP Hosting, and SAP S/4HANA-related Services. 

The PAC RADAR is supplemented by a dynamic tool that allows user companies to weight all evaluated criteria in line with their specific preferences. For instance, the provider long list this tool compiles for a midsize company looking for a services partner for SAP S/4HANA migration may differ greatly from the list generated for a global corporation looking for a services provider to migrate and operate a complex SAP environment.