Sustainability-related software and IT services in Austria

Sustainability is an emerging topic in Austria's software and IT services market. Current developments in companies' offerings are mainly driven by regulations and public pressure.

For instance:

• The European Corporate Sustainability Reporting Directive (CSRD) will require a number of companies to qualitatively assess sustainability within their status reports. In PAC’s opinion, these developments will mainly affect the collection and storage of data as well as the tools used to create these reports.
• In February 2022, Vienna launched the Smart Climate City framework strategy, which sets strategic goals for its sustainable development until 2050 and climate neutrality by 2040. Regarding digitalization, Vienna aims to become the innovation leader and digitalization capital of Europe by 2030. In PAC’s opinion, this is a vertical-specific development which also needs to be considered in the specific geography. Nevertheless, the approach could act as a lighthouse project for other smart city approaches.

With respect to the Austrian SITS providers and their strategies, sustainability is an emerging topic. For example,

• A1 Telekom Austria aims to reduce its own carbon footprint to zero by 2030.
• Kapsch TrafficCom is aiming for CO2 neutrality by 2027.
• BRZ, a captive vendor for the public sector in Austria, contributes to climate protection by sourcing 100% of its energy from renewable sources and aiming for zero CO2 emissions for its data centers.

PAC expects to see significant investments in the future:

• For example, companies across all verticals will invest in energy management solutions. All data centers need to become climate neutral. Different verticals are faced with different requirements, such as utilities (e.g., digital monitoring of smart energy grids) and manufacturing (e.g., managing the energy consumption of plants).
• Another field of investment is horizontal solutions (including tools to help companies gather the data needed to create reports according to the CSRD) and software dashboards.