Technology
SAP completes the acquisition of SmartRecruiters, strengthening its position in AI-powered talent acquisition, competing with Oracle and Workday; the deal enhances SAP SuccessFactors with advanced recruitment automation and candidate experience tools. However, GR20 believes what is ultimately at stake for SAP is the relevance of its AI infrastructure - ensuring it is well-positioned to benefit from the rise of AI agents in enterprise environments. They anticipate that it will take a few more quarters before SAP and its peers are able to monetise AI at scale. This will depend on customers accelerating the consolidation of their data into unified semantic models.
Technology Spending Intentions Survey: Tracking tech budget trends & vendor demand
Technology
ETR’s Jan TSIS, based on responses from 1,835 tech leaders, projects 5.3% Y/Y IT spending growth in 2025, the highest since Jul 22. 73% of organisations plan budget increases, driven by cloud expansion and project acceleration. Notably, only 6% cited new vendor adoption, while 12% focused on enhancing capabilities with existing vendors - reinforcing debates around platformisation vs. vendor sprawl. TSIS tracks hundreds of companies and each quarter ETR publishes 200+ vendor specific reports. In their most recent webinar, they highlighted 20 vendors including AWS, Google, Salesforce, Snowflake, Workday and Zscaler - 13 had positive outlooks, 2 were downgraded and 3 maintained their outlook.
Technology
Evidence suggests new CEO Carl Eschenbach will profitably scale WDAY to over $10bn in sales - a legendary enterprise software leader, he will boost the group’s go-to-market capabilities, driving greater cross selling of Financial Management software, accelerating international growth, optimising organisational effectiveness and driving margin expansion. Eschenbach is one of the most strongly endorsed CEOs that Paragon Intel has analysed, with all sources uniformly praising him, including all six former colleagues protesting when asked if he had any weaknesses, a first in Paragon’s research process.
