SAP Phils. eyes 4 areas to enter SME market

SOFTWARE solutions company SAP Philippines will focus on mobility, analytics, in-memory computing and cloud computing to get a share of the small and medium enterprises market in the country.

The firm sees a demand for tailor-fit enterprise applications in these four areas, said Darren Rushworth, SAP Philippines, Inc. managing director, during a press conference in Cebu City.

Rushworth said the firm would like to grow revenues in the four areas by at least 50 percent in the next few years.

“We have close to 800 clients in the Philippines and about 700 of that are SMEs mostly from the Luzon area. Now we will often be holding summits in Visayas and Mindanao because there are a lot of SMEs in these regions as well,” said Rushworth.

A SAP-SME Summit was held in Quest Hotel last Wednesday.

With business transactions now heavily done on mobile phones, he said analytics could help make the volume of data relevant for businesses.

“The amount of data that we recorded from history until 2003 is the same in quantity as that we created in the last 12 hours and we have even backed that up already. Question is what do we do with that data? Analytics is then more and more important nowadays,” he said.

With social media so popular, a company also wants to know how to make use of information like customer feedback.

“Analytics can do that for a company which they can use for business decisions, plans and strategies,” he said.

In-memory computing allows customers to use data in real time. The application called HANA allows a client to know a customer’s credit history and could approve loan applications online.

“In stiff competition, real time decisions also spell the game in order to be competitive. Some of our clients use information like a person’s location through his smart phones GPS or where a person often visits and sends in promo coupons through their mobile devices in real time while the person is near their establishment,” said Rushworth.

SAP Philippines is partnering with 15 schools through a university alliance program, mostly in Luzon, to expose students to their programs, incuding the University of the Philippine, Mapua Institute of Technology, AMA Computer University, Far Eastern University, and University of Sto. Tomas./With a report from Correspondent Sean Timothy Salvador