SAP Africa's newly-appointed head of database technology and mobility, Manoj Bhoola says his focus will be on driving sales in the database technology and mobility areas across the African continent.
According to Bhoola, who was appointed yesterday, a large part of the design and technology space resides in HANA, an in-memory database solution that enables the running of businesses' database platforms.
Adoption of HANA has been fairly robust globally and SAP sees huge opportunity to grow popularity in Africa for both large and SME organisations, he notes.
"My initial goals are going to be to create a go-to-market strategy that will help us drive the benefits of the platform to our existing and potential customer bases," he says. "Further to this, with the advent of mobility in the enterprise workforce, we find we're well-situated to provide value to organisations and I'll be driving this actively."
Bhoola points out that middleware has become a key ingredient to any business solution and, with several middleware solutions to offer, he will be helping SAP land this message with customers.
He notes that big data is a major trend impacting businesses. "This is no longer a buzzword but a reality today. Structured, unstructured and open data can be used to better profile stakeholders and in-memory, again, is a driving factor for successful use of this data.
"Big data is nothing without a robust engine driving things like analytics or reporting. In-memory computing drives this extremely effectively, providing huge value to organisations," he notes.
To Bhoola, SAP has not only embraced this trend but actually anticipated and drove it. "Anyone who keeps track of the company would know this - the company offers not only solid in-memory computing solutions but also the mobility stack needed to enable companies to embrace it. We partner with hardware vendors like IBM and HP to provide solid solutions to companies of all sizes across Africa."
Mobility is another trend exploding across the African continent and the requirement for apps running on devices that hook up to mission-critical solutions is becoming a demand, he says.
His personal wish list includes developer outreach. "Nothing is cast in stone as yet, but there are many developers writing for in-memory computing and I'd like to embrace them into the SAP eco-system. This is an extremely exciting space and I'd love to develop a community that will help us grow and harness the platform."
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