German business software giant SAP, which dominates the Russian ERP market with a whopping 50.5% market share, plans to invest €1 billion in Russia and the CIS markets by 2015, Frank Cohen, the President of SAP EMEA, announced at a news conference on Tuesday.
SAP plans to fuel the development of mobile applications and cloud services in the first stage of its expansion program. Second, the company intends to double the number of staff at its CIS offices and more than triple the number of outside SAP advisors it employs, to 20,000, by 2015. Currently, SAP CIS employs 700 people and boasts 6,500 certified consultants working on SAP software implementation projects at other companies. The ultimate goal of SAP is to reach €1 billion in revenues on the CIS market by 2015, Cohen stated.
Among other measures that SAP is ready to undertake to strengthen its market position, particularly in the governmental sector, is opening an R&D lab in Russia by 2012. SAP is eyeing Skolkovo, the state-sponsored innovation hub under construction near Moscow, as the location for this new facility.
Source: RIA Novosti
