On the heels of the launch of SAP’s flagship, SAP Business Suite powered by HANA, in January this year, enterprise application software leader SAP Africa hosted a customer and media event held in Johannesburg today to showcase African success stories powered by SAP HANA.

Rising IT and operational business costs coupled with a scarcity of skills mean that businesses of all sizes in Africa are increasingly pressured to simplify the IT landscape while innovating in order to succeed in a competitive market. To complicate matters, many businesses are faced with the challenges of integrating disparate IT systems and increasingly rigorous compliance issues. In order to stay on top, they require deep integration and precise insight from their business data when and where they need it and to spend more time and resources on innovation and less on keeping the lights on.

SAP Africa has demonstrated solid double-digit growth over the last few years and SAP Business Suite Powered by SAP HANA supported by the new extended edition of SAP Enterprise Foundation are expected to play important roles in further driving growth into 2013 and beyond. SAP Business Suite Powered by SAP HANA enables businesses in Africa to rapidly leapfrog older technologies to get the latest innovations and business benefits. With SAP HANA, judicious organisations in Africa are already securing a competitive edge through real-time insight and intelligent analysis of their business operations based on large volumes of transactional data coming from various sources across the organisation.

Royal Swazi Sugar Corporation (RSSC), based in Swaziland, is the first SAP Business Suite powered by SAP HANA customer in Africa. The organisation chose the solution with the goal to speed up processes, increase efficiency, productivity and improve systems integration. “RSSC is one of the largest companies in Swaziland, employing more than 3 500 people while producing two-thirds of the country’s sugar and ethanol. A key factor in choosing SAP Business Suite powered by SAP HANA is the objective to realise true business efficiency and rapid real-time insight into our data,” said Rob Coombe, RSSC’s Group IT Manager.

Combining SAP Business Suite powered by SAP HANA with innovations from Analytics, Mobility and Cloud Technology, is the ideal entry solution enabling organisations to accelerate their growth strategy and innovate like never before with a fully integrated comprehensive solution. It can be consumed from the SAP HANA Enterprise Cloud with a growing number of data centres in Europe and Africa as well as on premise at the customer site.

“With unparalleled real-time abilities, SAP Business Suite powered by SAP HANA has quite simply changed the technology game,” said Pfungwa Serima CEO, SAP Africa. “In order to remain relevant, companies have no choice but to keep up with rapid growth and change, improve profitability and reduce the cost of running their operations. In high growth markets such as Africa, one of the biggest challenges is to accelerate productivity while keeping abreast of all business-relevant factors. SAP Enterprise Foundation extended edition is a powerful anchor for solutions, providing everything a business needs in a small footprint.”

For more information, visit the SAP Newsroom.

SAP Accelerates Business Growth in Africa with HANA In-Memory Innovation

Editorial contacts
Antonia Stafford Ashton
+27 (21) 528 1700
antonia.ashton@sap.com

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