SAP expands in East Africa

Systems Applications Products (SAP) has confirmed its plans to upgrade operations in the East African region with Nairobi acting as its operations hub, says Daily Nation.

SAP's vice-president for emerging markets, Brett Parker, confirmed that plans are under way to expand the firm's local operations by enhancing its Nairobi office and sales partners' capacity.

The expansion move has been necessitated by the region's rapid development in the ICT arena, which has raised the demand for business process management software systems, Parker explained.

As the US appears to be emerging out of the shadows of recession, the SME sector in India is evincing interest in investing in the US market with a view to grow and expand its business, says The Economic Times.

"In the last nine months a sizeable number of SMEs have been looking at becoming minority stakeholders and partnering with US firms", said Siddharth Sarawgi, director India office, Fairfax County.

The opportunities for the SME sector do not lie only in IT, but in sectors like life sciences, aerospace, defence and IT-related opportunities in education and healthcare.

Small and medium enterprises are slowly but surely embracing technology, and incorporating it to their business operation; however, you will seldom find a SME with its own IT department, writes Manila Bulletin.

The IT department of most SMEs is the computer or laptop itself. For this reason, while technology is helping them in doing their businesses, some aspects of technology are being compromised - like security.

According to the 2009 'National small business cyber security study', small business owners' cyber security policies and actions are not adequate enough to ensure the safety of their employees, intellectual property and customer data.