SAP Africa has launched GROW with SAP, an ERP cloud offering targeted at South Africa’s small-to-medium business (SMB) market segment.
Following the official launch in Johannesburg yesterday, Evert-Jan Tromp, SAP's VP of mid-marketsolution sales for the EMEA South region, said 80% of SAP Africa’s current customer base is in the SME space, but there is still a perception that SAP is only for large and complex companies.
“This offering is an important step in addressing technology requirements within the mid-market segment. SAP has over fifty years’ experience in ERP, and we leverage this experience and global best practices,” said Tromp. “This is a journey we started last year and have now organised under the umbrella offering GROW with SAP. Our objective is to drive customer acquisition and new capabilities.”
Tromp said GROW with SAP incorporates bundled offerings including SAP S/4 HANA public cloud, accelerated adoption services, a global community of experts and free learning resources.
It also includes SAP Business Technology Platform (BTP), so customers can define their own processes in a cloud-native way using SAP Build.
“With SAP Build solutions, business users can create enterprise apps, automate processes and design business sites without writing code,” Tromp added.
He said that one of the key elements in ERP cloud is the need 'to keep the core clean'.
"With SAP, twice a year, we deliver new capabilities as ubiquitous innovation is extremely important in a changing world. The only way to do this is to ensure that the core, which is crucial to the ERP business, is kept clean. We leverage the BTP to enable customers and partners to build extensions onto the platform released as a standard.”
SAP BTP features about 114 different applications.
Research conducted by SAP Africa found that digital transformation specialists were in-demand at 48% of African organisations, indicating a potential skills gap for companies wishing to scale into the cloud.
SAP Africa said that according to IDC research, many mid-size businesses find themselves growing rapidly and need their technology to grow with their business as they encounter the same issues related to global complexity as larger enterprise businesses.
Mickey North Rizza, IDC enterprise software group VP, said, “With GROW with SAP, SAP recognised they need to better fit the business and technology requirements of mid-size companies looking for a cloud ERP solution."
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