China’s small and midsize businesses (SMBs), which represent two-thirds of all businesses in the country, have a new front office solution for e-commerce, thanks to a collaboration between China Telecom and SAP.
According to an eMarketer study, B2C e-commerce sales in China grew by 63.8 per cent in 2014, leaps ahead of any other country in the world (Australian e-commerce growth was 5.7 per cent). The SAP Anywhere solution will take advantage of this growth by allowing SMBs to create online stores in minutes, and have a full set of features available via the cloud or mobile devices. These include inventory control and insight, online marketplace management, and business and customer engagement.
According to SAP, vendors, customers and partners can access shared inventory and logistics insights in real time through unified order management software, and integrate internal and external back-office sources to generate analytics. From a customer perspective, it provides an integrated digital product showroom to be easily accessed via mobile devices, as well as campaign marketing functions.
China Telecom, which has had an ongoing collaboration with SAP, worked with the vendor to customise SAP Anywhere for the Chinese market within its telecommunications infrastructure. It will be provided as a software-as-a-service solution by China Datacom, a subsidiary of China Comservice, in a public cloud.
On the collaboration, Gao Tongqing, deputy general manager, China Telecom, said, “The impact that mobile e-commerce has brought to China becomes deeper as time goes on. Ergo, it is our obligation to think and act before our customers do, and fulfil their potential need for e-commerce, even help them to transform to e-commerce. We believe SAP Anywhere will play an active and important role in helping our customers achieve business growth.”
Plans for SAP Anywhere in China were first announced at SAPPHIRE NOW 2015.
China Telecom has had a strong focus on providing technology China’s SMBs for some time, signing a three-year agreement in August with IBM to deliver cloud-based SAP applications to businesses.
