The world will be coming to Africa… and SAP has geared itself to accommodate this migration, particularly where it concerns the integration of applications across a myriad of industries and sectors on the continent.
Speaking at a roundtable on mobility and issues affecting businesses across Africa at the SAP Saphila 2012 conference, Robert Enslin, President, Global Customer Operations SAP AG, described the company’s Hana offering as “the solution for Africa”.
Hana is appliance software that is designed to aggregate substantial volumes of data and produce relevant results for the business in realtime.
Executive leadership at SAP used the conference forum to reiterate the value of Hana for emerging businesses in Africa.
“In the future to be able to serve your consumers means to serve the segment of one and the segment of one is you. Previously we served businesses and now we serve the ‘segment of one’ which means everything you do will be available to make decisions on. If you are a CIO and you don’t believe in big data to make decisions on, you will probably be out of a job quite quickly because your company can no longer afford to make decisions on historical trends…that’s old…people are making decisions on what happens right now,” explained Enslin.
This means that IT department has to react quickly and ensure that this channel is open for an immediate response.
“This is the future. You will never be able to make decisions in the luxury of an eight to five hour time frame. The world will come to Africa. There are seven billion people in the world, there will be ten… in order to feed all the people you have to find the next destination.China has already come to Africa, we’ve seen the Indians come to Africa, the Malaysians have come to Africa… it’s the next economic geography to expand. Seven of the world’s fastest growing economies are in Africa,” said Enslin.
There is an opportunity for businesses inAfricato adopt this technology and leapfrog traditional systems to position the businesses competitively.
Chris Tredger, Online Editor
