The business world is changing and the economic crisis is the culprit, says Simon Carpenter, SAP Africa director of strategic initiatives, speaking at the SAP World Tour 2009, in Midrand, this week.
“In the last 10 months, we've seen the world experience a troubling set of circumstances. The economic recession has touched every country in the world. It's very uncertain times for all of us, as individuals and organisations.”
The SAP World Tour takes place in 50 countries around the world, and has brought together over 240 000 customers, partners and industry experts over the past five years. The company says this global tour offers a local event similar to Sapphire, its major annual conference, which took place in Orlando, Florida, in May.
After signing the BusinessObjects acquisition, which closed last year, SAP set out to integrate more functionality into its business intelligence platform. This resulted in the birth of SAP BusinessObjects Explorer, with SAP using the world tour to drive the solution to market.
Other products featured at the event included the SAP NetWeaver SOA platform and SAP Business Suite 7. The business suite features applications in enterprise resource management, customer relationship management, product lifecycle management, supplier relationship management and supply chain management.
“Introducing SAP BusinessObjects Explorer allows the user to search massive amounts of data and provides business insight to that data using an interactive interface. It's all about taking the mounds of data and bringing it into one place, structuring it where you can manage and then using the tools to make decisions based on it,” said Carpenter.
Carpenter explained that, in general, SAP has two main customers: those looking to control costs, who use SAP's IT solutions as business enablers simply to survive the tough times; and established companies, which use SAP's products to gain insight into new markets to expand into and to increase their partner and customer bases.
He added: “We want customers to realise that even though there is a lot of doom and gloom out there, business is relentless and they need to be thinking about consolidating IT, getting rid of legacy systems and using a solid platform that reduces complexity and cost.”
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