SAP to roll out strategic plans and new alliances in Sri Lanka

By Cassandra Mascarenhas

Market leader in enterprise application software, SAP, a company that has enjoyed a long and successful track record in the country, renewed its commitment to Sri Lanka yesterday by announcing new alliances and strategic plans for the country that will be rolled out within the course of the coming year.

SAP India Managing Director Peter Gartenberg (left) enlightens the gathering on SAP’s new initiatives for Sri Lanka as SAP India Head of Emerging Businesses Sales Priyadarshi Mohapatra (right) looks on

One of the most notable initiatives is the much recognised ‘Run Better’ Solutions Road Tour which brings SAP’s customers and partners onto a common platform. Apart from its long standing partner CSL, SAP has now signed a new strategic sales alliance with local partners such as N*Able, PHC and JIT to drive its business in Sri Lanka.

“Sri Lanka is not new to SAP; we have been here for a very long time. However, we see some very exciting things happening in Sri Lanka and we believe that Sri Lanka is ready to move to the next level in terms of adoption and innovation in the IT arena and that is why we have chosen this time to build a strategic plan around Sri Lanka to bring in resources and more importantly, to build up our local resources,” explained SAP India Managing Director Peter Gartenberg.

Part of that initiative is to bring to Sri Lanka the ‘Run Better’ tour for the first time, which he said would bring in customers, partners and SAP together to talk about innovation, building this economy, building and developing Sri Lanka for the future.

The second part of this plan is leveraging talent and building up the capacity in Sri Lanka. Sri Lanka has tremendous IT potential, intelligence and talent in Sri Lanka, which Gartenberg said needs to be exposed to the kind of technology that SAP is leading the world with today.

As part of this initiative, SAP plans on bringing in new partners and has established a very thorough plan in terms if building academic alliances in order to nurture and build up the talent available in the country. When bringing in new partners, the Managing Director emphasised that they are looking at a mix of local home-grown businesses and global partners to work with SAP to serve and develop Sri Lankan customers.

“This economy is taking off, and it’s not just doing so locally, but it is also going global and that is why SAP comes in. We are in the business of taking companies and making them grow, innovate, making them more competitive in the local and global markets and that is the direction of our offerings to Sri Lanka,” he said. “We are looking to strengthen our existing partnerships and create new partnerships both with the public and private sector in order to take Sri Lanka to the next level in terms of local and global growth.”

The existing partners such as Prism, Zensar, IBM, SGIT and Attune will provide SAP solutions that meet specific industry requirements in sectors like banking and financial services, telecommunications, retail and consumer, manufacturing and apparel and footwear. They will also introduce solutions to newer sectors such as hospitality, transport and logistics, dairy and the pharmaceutical industries.

In addition to its flagship ERP product, SAP will also introduce its line of business solutions which will comprise of HCM, SCM, CRM, business analytics and mobility in Sri Lanka.

SAP’s delegation of top management is in Sri Lanka for the launch of new strategic plans in the country

With business expertise in 28 varying industries, SAP has observed unprecedented growth across diverse sectors in Sri Lanka. With the discovery of natural gas reserves in the country, SAP is also especially confident of the growth potential in the oil and gas sector. In the highly-evolved local banking sector, SAO will focus on business intelligence and analytics for smarter, quicker decision making, enabling its solutions on mobile devices for easier and real time action.

“Emerging businesses are now exposed to greater opportunities than ever before for expansion and diversification across all sizes and sectors in Sri Lanka as they begin to utilise technology to support exponential growth,” said SAP India Head of Emerging Businesses Sales Priyadarshi Mohapatra. “The Government here is very bullish about IT as an enabler and we are here to partner and this growth and there are steps that we are taking towards that.”

SAP has significantly expanded its market for enterprise software solutions in Sri Lanka by aggressively targeting the large enterprises as well as small businesses and midsize companies.

As market leader in enterprise software for over 35 years, SAP has collaborated with some of the largest organisations in Sri Lanka such as John Keells Holdings, MAS Holdings, Dialog Telekom, Ceylon Tobacco Company and Hemas Holdings.

Public sector entities such as the Employees Provident Fund Department of the Central Bank of Sri Lanka and Ceylon Petroleum Storage Terminals have also chosen SAP solutions to better run their businesses.

- Pix by Daminda Harsha Perera