By Freya Purnell
Andrew Barkla, SAP ANZ’s new president and managing director, has called on the ecosystem to help SAP meet the challenges of a rapidly changing business world, in his opening address to the SAP Forum Australia.
“We do not have another 40 years to develop the solutions to tomorrow’s business problems,” Barkla said.
He pointed to the SAP Start-up Forum, a program for young innovators to showcase how SAP HANA can be harnessed to solve business problems, as an example of the type of cooperation it would like to see in the future.
“We need the SAP community, customers and partners, to be writing solutions, developing applications to build on that platform,” he said. “We want millions of people writing applications and designing solutions to business problems that can be delivered to everyone on the SAP App Store.”
Describing SAP as the “most relevant software company in the world”, he said the company’s role is to “start defining the possible futures for our customers so they can do their jobs better”.
Barkla also said he joined SAP from Unisys because of its clear track record of innovation, particularly in the key technology areas of mobile, in-memory, and cloud.
“I had been working with my customers in the region on what we call disruptive trends and how we would help clients address these problems, in mobility, cloud, big data, consumerisation of IT and social computing. So I did my research and found that SAP was already innovating the answers to these disruptions, and that’s why I’m here with you today.”
