By Tom Noda
German software giant SAP is preparing to launch a sales hub in the Philippines that will lead the company’s sales efforts into new territories across South East Asia and Asia Pacific.
Darren Rushworth, managing director of SAP Philippines, said the new regional hub will be open by end-August and will be located at the Robinsons CyberScape Beta Tower in Ortigas Complex in Pasig City.
“We’re investing in telephone sales people, business development people, and even technology consultants who can provide information and guidance to our customers,” Rushworth said. “The idea really is to provide a more scalable sales engine across SEA and APAC and we’ve chosen the Philippines.”
The executive said SAP will initially hire 50 people to run the facility and aims to double it by next year. The plan is under the company’s project Nucleus, which is a call center but is more sales-oriented. The amount of investment was not disclosed.
“SAP is putting in a shared services for finance, HR (human resource), back office shared services. Our global HR is now in the Philippines and we will continue to grow and invest in those areas,” Rushworth said.
Like many companies, Rushworth said SAP is looking at talent, cost, and business opportunities as some of the reasons for locating in the Philippines.
“Another factor is we have lots of business opportunities that we can’t continue to pursue the old way. We need to look at leveraging call centers, inside sales, telesales to cover the market,” he said.
“We have a lot of opportunities in a lot of countries. It doesn’t make sense anymore to go and hire another thousand of field sales people, it’s not productive. We need to scale up.”
In SAP’s search for a Value Added Reseller (VAR), it partnered recently with outsourcing services provider Shore Solutions, which is expected to broaden SAP solutions to companies in the Philippines.
Shore Solutions, in turn, joined the SAP PartnerEdge program and has become an SAP channel partner authorized to resell SAP cloud solutions, including those from SuccessFactors — a provider of cloud-based Human Capital Management (HCM) software in the Philippines — which is also an SAP company.
“We are excited that Shore is SAP’s new reseller for cloud-based HCM solutions. Their team?s experience in Human Capital Management for the last 15 years will enable successful implementation and execution of talent management processes in the country,” Rushworth said.
Shore Solutions currently has four locations in Manila and over 1,500 employees offering a suite of voice support services involving technical and multi-tiered customer support engagements complemented by outbound and inbound sales skillset.
It also offers IT services for companies worldwide, providing both onsite and offshore solutions and services relating to enterprise solutions.
