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SAP
courts new business
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SAP
Caribbean’s Andrés González León
presents his company’s case to potential and current
customers at Hilton’s La Boucan Room on Wednesday last
week. To his right is colleague Carlos Torres-Banchs. Photo:
Mark Lyndersay
IT
WAS curious to see two executives from German enterprise
software powerhouse SAP at the Hilton shilling their product
to a group of IT officers. a few weeks ago.
The video chosen by the company’s Territory Manager,
Andrés González León to open his presentation
was even more unusual, a fast-paced parkour race with three
hip-looking young men in suits jumping, rolling and running
to the top of a building overlooking a densely populated
city.
SAP, you see, is the 800 pound gorilla of the Enterprise
Resource Planning (ERP) software sector, a company that
earned 9.4 billion euros in 2006 through business relationships
with 43,000 companies worldwide. It may see itself as nimble,
but it leaves behind a heavy footprint.
The company’s claims to have 12 million users spread
over 120 countries, many of them clustered in the largest
companies in the world, including Microsoft and Apple, who
have chosen the German company’s product over building
something homegrown.
“This
is all we do,” says González León. “We
don’t build gadgets or games. What we do, and what
we invest 30 per cent of our profits into, is software for
enterprise.”
Caribbean thrust
The Caribbean arm of the company has landed 150 customers
in the region, a handful of which are in T&T. Local
companies making the transition to SAP include Clico, Angostura,
bpTT, Petrotrin and NGC.
What those companies have in common apart from significant
business cashflows is a focus on world markets, which increasingly
insist on the kind of streamlined business transparency
and reporting that’s built into SAP’s software.
The traditional customer of the 30-year-old company has
tended to be multinational corporations and large manufacturing
enterprises, but in the Caribbean and Latin America, SAP
has also broadened its focus to small and medium sized companies.
Now in SAP-speak, a small company is one with 100 employees
and income in the upper millions, so Caribbean-scale small
businesses need not apply. That market is still being well
served by solutions from Microsoft and Sage.
SAP’s software core, now dubbed Netweaver, is the base
platform used across its product mix, which ranges from
SAP Business Suite at the high end to SAP Business One.
Using the same technology allows businesses to grow with
the product, adding plug-in modules to address specific
business requirements.
Some of these modules are designed to support legacy data,
the information that businesses have been using to run their
companies which need translation for use on a new software
platform.
Making companies compliant
SAP offers a number of modules for such data transfer and
has partners who offer many more. Walmart, for instance,
built its own data connector to link its home-built database
with Netweaver.
One key module that may not seem particularly sexy is delivered
by a line item in the Financial and Managerial Accounting
module, “prebuilt support for international reporting
standards.”
That has been one of the key lever points for the adoption
of SAP in companies who want to do business in Europe and
the US, a code-deep system that demands that corporations
align with a number of compliance protocols that all but
force companies using SAP to reengineer their businesses
to the standards of global commerce.
This process can be hard for companies with ingrained ways
of doing business, particularly when those ways circumvent
established protocols in the name of speed and efficiency.
For that reason, SAP adoption has become the Buckleys cure
for many of the local companies that have invested in it.
SAP’s González León is upfront about
the issue.
“Some
projects were a little painful,” he noted in his address
to the Hilton audience, “but nobody has backed out
of using the product.”
SAP’s renewed thrust into T&T isn’t just focused
on software for smaller businesses than they usually market
to. The company is forging deeper links here, assisting
Petrotrin with creating a SAP user group, which will bring
together corporate users with solutions providers and SAP
technical advisers. SAP Caribbean is also on the verge of
signing contracts with two local IT service providers who
were unnamed, but described as enthusiastic about switching
from their current product development and support to SAP.
Because the application layer that users interact with is
written in Sun Microsystem’s Java language, local IT
companies can customise and build modules for SAP using
an open language that they are already familiar with.
To deepen its commitment to the Caribbean, SAP must begin
to build a software ecosystem here with equal helpings of
support and developers committed to the platform.
The message at the Hilton last week may have been advertised
for customers, but it was also a planting of the flag for
a software vendor that clearly wants to do more business
in the Caribbean.
“This
is all we do, we don’t build
gadgets or games. What we do, and what we invest 30 per
cent of our
profits into, is software for enterprise.”
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