SAP Turns 25 Years in APAC with Focus on Innovation and Skills Development

SAP SE has announced its plans to expand innovation capabilities in Singapore with an SAP Innovation Center by the end of 2014, focusing on delivering breakthrough innovations around Smart Cities, Industry 4.0, Healthcare and Digital Consumers. 

In an increasingly networked economy powered by smart devices, the SAP Innovation Center aims to foster local economic opportunities by identifying untapped market and customer needs and creating new innovative, user-centric products. This involves co-innovation with SAP customers and partners as well as research collaboration with local universities. Further fuelling the startup ecosystem, the center will provide local startups with the latest technologies and offer market access to expand their reach.

“While our technology is very sophisticated, it actually delivers a dramatically simplified IT landscape that benefits our customers,” said Rob Enslin, Executive Board Member and President of Global Customer Operations at SAP. “It ties in with our “run simple” philosophy, which includes simplifying our products and by extension, makes it easier for customers to take advantage of SAP technologies. In line with our vision to improve lives, this SAP Innovation Center will deliver a constant stream of innovative software solutions to tackle the great challenges of our time.”

“Asia Pacific is a fast-growing region. We are now entering the era of Internet of Things with the rapid growth of smart, connected devices and systems to meet the changing demands of today’s consumers.  As we embrace a networked, technology-driven innovative economy, we will focus on accelerating industry growth in public services, healthcare, financial services and retail,” said Adaire Fox-Martin, President of SAP Asia Pacific Japan. “Building on our 25-year presence in the region, we look forward to continued commitment and close collaboration with customers, partners, governments and universities throughout Asia Pacific, to drive innovation and skills development.”

SAP is also tapping on the increasingly vibrant IT ecosystem across the region to identify ideas at an early stage and leverage access to a large pool of the brightest young talent. Under the SAP University Alliances Student Entrepreneurship program, students can develop new solutions across SAP’s technologies leveraging in-memory platform SAP HANA, the SAP Mobile Platform and analytics capabilities. The students will gain access to these technologies, SAP experts, mentors and an entrepreneurship curriculum. Launched globally in March, the Student Entrepreneurship program was recently announced in Australia, Singapore and India and will be introduced in Japan and Korea later this year.

The SAP University Alliances program opens up the world of SAP to more than 1,800 universities in more than 80 countries worldwide, and aims to develop highly qualified graduates with critical skills for the 21^st century workforce. Annually, over two thousand tertiary students in Singapore benefit from this program.

Through a robust Young Thinkers program, SAP is also expanding its university partnerships to stimulate interest in STEM (science, technology, engineering and math) in youths, address the gap in skills shortage and encourage entrepreneurial thinking. Across the region, this experiential learning program involves secondary/K-12 schools, government agencies and NGOs in Singapore, India and Australia to help youths understand the benefits brought about by Big Data today and its impact on societies, businesses and everyday life.

The Singapore Economic Development Board (EDB) welcomed SAP’s expanded presence in Singapore which helps to reinforce the country’s position as a digital innovation capital for companies and industries. Quek Swee Kuan, Deputy Managing Director at EDB said: “For 25 years, SAP has been a key partner to Singapore in its contribution to the ICT industry. By providing co-innovation opportunities, the new Innovation Centre will enable companies to pursue their desired digital transformation strategies from Singapore. This builds on SAP’s active talent development efforts to leverage the capabilities of Singaporean students and researchers, and marks a deepening of our partnership.”