SAP is aiming to get closer to its customers

By ADAM GIFFORD

The new chief of SAP Australia and New Zealand, Geraldine McBride, is looking to transform the way the German enterprise resource planning software giant does business in this part of the world.

"Transformation" is a word McBride uses a lot to describe what she has been doing during the three years since she left the top job at SAP New Zealand to join SAP's North American operation.

Starting as a vice-president responsible for sales to consumer packaged goods companies, she shifted to manufacturing before building a team to take SAP's new customer relationship management product to market.

Enterprise resource planning software was coming out of the pre-Y2K boom into the post-Y2K slump, and all vendors faced tough questions about how they should be doing business.

For SAP, it has meant a new focus on the mid-market, an effort to get close to its existing customer base so it can sell more products, and a strong push for its customer relationship management and supply chain management offerings.

"We grew faster than the competition in the market and gained market share," said McBride, who will be based in Sydney.

She said companies in this part of the world had been slow to embrace customer relationship management, which involves companies looking outwards to the customer.

"SAP has strong solutions, and I would be looking to repeat the sort of success we are having in North America."

McBride said she left the United States because she did not want to put her teenage daughter into the US high school system.

Her elevation to the top job in Australia was sudden, she said, but the industry grapevine had suggested for several months that Chris Bennett would be pushed aside in her favour.

Bennett, who came to SAP from consulting firm PricewaterhouseCoopers, said he was resigning for personal reasons.

McBride said SAP New Zealand would retain its autonomy. "I understand the New Zealand market very well. New Zealand needs to be a subsidiary in its own right," she said.

Resellers are being lined up to sell a new SAP Business One solution aimed at mid-market companies, and McBride also expects to be hiring aggressively.

"I will be looking to attract more talent to the company."

She said changes in the consulting sector and the requirements from customers for shorter IT projects with faster return on investment had changed the way software companies needed to work.

SAP's professional services arm would only ever be able to serve about 10 to 15 per cent of the market, so consulting partners were still needed.

"Our strategy will be to get closer to the customer as well as growing the pie. We are not interested in competing with partners," McBride said.

SAP has been seen as a product for large companies because of its complexity and high implementation and integration costs.

The company has been working on reducing many of those costs, and last week announce its NetWeaver integration and application platform.

It says NetWeaver will allow SAP and its partners to create new applications tying together multiple systems and technologies.

It also includes what SAP calls master data management services.

NetWeaver wraps together a lot of SAP offerings, including technology it has built for web and mobile access to applications, its portal and collaboration software, business intelligence, knowledge management, an integration broker and business process management.

It will work with either Microsoft. NET or IBM WebSphere environments.