SAP will invest AED 1.65 billion on a four-year growth plan in MENA, which it referred to as “the fastest growing region for SAP going forward,” it announced today.
The software giant will recruit over 500 additional employees, open several new offices and expand its partner ecosystem and University Alliances program. It will also establish a dedicated ‘Training and Development Institute’ aiming to certify 2,000 new consultants within the next four years.
It said the investments will triple its existing consulting capabilities in the region, accelerate innovation for its broad range of customers, build its market capacity and expand its footprint.
Werner Brandt, Global CFO at SAP, referred to 2011 as the company’s “best ever year” and said by 2015 it anticipates exceeding €20 billion total global revenue and reaching over a billion people. 60% of the world’s transactions already run over SAP and the company includes 70% of the Forbes Fortune 1000 customers amongst its customers.
“In all regions we have double digit growth over 20%, but in EMEA we’ve seen strong growth built on great customer relationships despite uncertain economic conditions. Who would have believed at the beginning of 2011 that we could come out of the year so strongly in a region where everybody is arguing about the economy performance,” Brandt said.
“2012 is the year of investment into the MENA region. It is an emerging region for SAP with tremendous growth potential,” he added.
Brandt identified five market categories empowered by SAP HANA to move the company forward.
“Extending our leadership in applications and broadening our footprint in the area of analytics are the first two. Then we come to the new categories, the first one being strengthening our leadership in mobile,” Brandt said.
“We then want to become the fastest growing database and technology vendor in the world. Here our InMemory technology plays a very important role going forward. The final area is the cloud market – we want to become a profitable cloud leader. All of these are empowered by HANA, which is a category in itself,” he added.
