SAP TO TARGETS SME MARKET

SAP Thailand’s business plan for the year is to continue expanding its enterprise resource planning (ERP) customer base, in particular in the small and medium enterprise (SME) market. 

It also will have a huge focus to sell mobility, customer relationship management (CRM), business intelligence (BI) and real-time analytic into its base and beyond.  The company also will focus on a few new areas very actively, and should be able to help customers extend their use of SAP to be best-run businesses, said SAP Thailand’s managing director, Thomas Tom Zack.

 

“We expect to see strong growth in key market segments, while others might be affected by the flooding.  Clearly the manufacturing segment and consumer products segment will have some impact from the flooding, with their focus to get their factories back online in the first quarter of 2012.  We see other industries like financial, security, and insurance [FSI], telco, public sector, and oil & gas continuing to grow very fast,” said Zack.

 

He added that SAP Thailand has been growing very fast for the last two years, and the company is continuing to invest in more resources, including more sales, pre-sales, consulting, and support staff.  

 

“In 2012, this will continue and we are quickly adding new people to the team to help us handle the very strong demand from our customers and prospects,” said Zack. 

The company is also investing significantly in marketing events to help raise awareness of the solutions, and how SAP can help Thai customers compete in an increasingly competitive market.  

 

“With more free-trade agreements, this is something that many prospects are calling us about, to see how SAP can help them get ready to compete regionally and globally,” Zack said.  

 

“As the largest and fastest-growing business applications company globally, and here in Thailand, we are well positioned to help them become Best-Run-Businesses,” said him.

He added that overall, the Thai economy has been in very good shape, and the impact of the flooding will be significant in some areas, but have little effect in others, so it will see the second half of 2012 returning to something much more normal in terms of spending and growth.

 

“Our business strategy the past two years has been to get very customer-centric and partner-centric in everything we do.  We have been very successful at delivering value to our customers, by focusing on solutions that are not only relevant for their industry, but bring true “Best Practice” for their industry to the customer.  This focus on industry has really paid dividends for us, and we have captured material market share as a result.  In 2012, we will continue this focus, with more specialisation from our partners around industry solutions.”  

 

The company plans to drive innovation around real-time-analytics and mobility, and bring to the market a specialised sales focus around core technologies to help its customers leverage more of its 3,000 existing products.  

 

He insisted that real-time analytics and mobility are two major technology shifts that will really shape IT in Thailand in 2012.  

 

With its key products, SAP Hana can leverage “in-memory” technology to help utilise the huge amounts of data, combined with real-time interfaces to the core ERP systems to make sure the latest data is always on the fingertips of the executives. Meanwhile, its Sybase SUP mobility and Afaria management can help customers deploy enterprise applications on a wide variety of devices easily, with security and manageability assured. 

 

Additionally, it has integrated solutions to deal with complex data types, especially social media like Facebook and Twitter. Therefore, its solutions can not only handle the data from these services, but it also helps guide intelligent decision-making as a result.  

 

“We have launched a number of cloud-computing services over the last two years. Thailand is not an early adopter of cloud offerings and is more conservative than other countries, but it will happen slowly over the coming years.  We have also just announced our intention to acquire SuccessFactors, the leader in Cloud-based HRM solutions, which will accelerate our move into this very fast-growing market segment,” said Zack.