RIYADH – As the Middle East's Internet of Things (IoT) revenue will reach nearly $2 billion in 2015, the Kingdom's organizations need to innovate with the power of Big Data, SAP announced Wednesday. With the Middle East's IoT market growth outpacing the global average, the region's IoT hardware and services revenues will reach nearly $2 billion in 2015, according to Deloitte. As the GCC diversifies its economy, the non-oil sector will grow by 6 percent in 2015, the International Monetary Fund said. In this emerging Digital Economy, as more objects and devices are connected together, they are creating vast amounts of data that Middle East businesses are looking to leverage for actionable insights into their supply chain, research and product development, customer preferences, and location-based services and offers. As Deloitte predicts that global IoT analytics revenues will grow by 500 percent over the next four years, SAP is seeing strong take-up in the Middle East for the recently-released SAP Business Suite on SAP HANA (SAP S/4 HANA), which connects people, devices, and business networks in real time. “The Internet of Things will be the Middle East's biggest game-changer, and enterprises need to develop comprehensive strategies to reimagine their businesses in the digital economy,” said Frank Forndron, SAP Head of Customer Office, SAP MENA, and Head of Quality Management for SAP MENA and EMEA Emerging Markets. “We're seeing strong demand for our SAP S4/HANA real-time in-memory business suite, which reduces complexity and cost, and delivers customer value and boosts the region's economy.” The advancing inter-connected Internet of Things (IoT) era will connect at least 50 billion devices and generate $14.4 trillion in value by 2020, according to a report by Stephenson Strategies and SAP. Already SAP counts more than 370 SAP S4/HANA customers worldwide, with key enterprises in the Middle East embracing the platform's in-memory and real-time capabilities to support economic growth. Bin Sammar Trading and Contracting Company, one of the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia's leading contracting companies with 14,000 employees, is deploying SAP S/4 HANA solutions to drive the Kingdom's engineering, construction, and operations sector, especially for mega-projects in infrastructure, transportation, telecommunications, and housing. “With the Kingdom's construction sector experiencing strong growth, our vision calls for utilizing state-of-the-art technology to enhance our business and the Kingdom's infrastructure,” said Shaikh Mus'ad Bin Sammar Al Otaibi, Founder and Chairman of Bin Sammar Trading and Contracting Company. “Analyzing data in real-time is transforming our supply chain, and project and talent management, ensuring that mega-projects are delivered on time and on budget.” Al Khalili Group, one of Oman's leading conglomerates, uses SAP S/4 HANA's real-time dashboard to track and analyze 40,000-plus items in Oman and the UAE, helping to determine product stocking, leading to faster decision-making, boosting competitiveness, and enhancing the customer experience. “With thousands of products and employees to manage daily, we needed greater visibility into supply chain to track our customers' orders and stocking, and to enable our staff to further develop their technology skills in the Digital Economy,” said Jumana Al-Hashmi of Al Khalili Group. “Providing real-time visibility is a major component of SAP S4/HANA, helping enable our expansion plans and supporting the region's economic growth.” SAP is now introducing the cloud edition of SAP S/4HANA to help customers drive their digital business transformation with the simplicity of the cloud. With hybrid on-premise and cloud solutions for IT flexibility and accelerated business innovation, customers can run their entire enterprise in the Cloud. "Data is growing at an unprecedented rate, driven by an explosion in the amount of mobile devices, cloud deployments, business transactions, digitization, and collaboration on social platforms,” said Dhiraj Daryani of research firm IDC. “The amount of information created and replicated is doubling in size every two years, and will reach 44 zettabytes, or 44 trillion gigabytes by 2020. Pioneering organizations in the Gulf States are investing in cutting-edge technologies to extract value from this rapidly growing data, which is available to them both from within their organization and from external data sources such as social media feeds." Demonstrating the strong demand for SAP solutions in the Kingdom, SAP Saudi Arabia recently received the “Software Vendor of the Year” at the Channel KSA Awards, thanks to delivering a wide range of the latest and innovative technology solutions to marquee customers in the Kingdom. In recognition of its talent development talent and support for economic growth in the Kingdom, SAP Saudi Arabia became one of the Kingdom's first organizations to receive the “Top Employer” award from the independent international organization the Top Employers Institute. — SG
