New SAP UK chief sees world of opportunity

SAP is seeking a bigger share of government IT budgets in the wake of the appointment of Steve Rogers as UK managing director.

Rogers most recently ran Siebel’s northern European business and previously held managerial roles at IBM, Oracle and Business Objects. Appointed in October, he will replace Graham Kingsmill at the end of the year. Kingsmill is leaving for personal reasons after five years at the enterprise applications giant.

“If you were to be critical of SAP you would say they didn’t grab hold of the public sector generally and central government especially while Oracle did a fantastic job,” Rogers said in a meeting with UK media.

Although public-sector IT spending has been heavy under Tony Blair’s government modernisation agenda, Rogers believes that huge projects such as ID cards will mean that SAP will have opportunities to better compete.

“The pendulum has really swung and shared services bring in a whole new debate,” he said. “[SAP chief executive] Henning Kagermann is one of the technology advisers to [German chancellor Angela] Merkel, and Gordon Brown and Merkel are getting quite close so who’s to say we won’t have an opportunity to meet senior figures in government?”

However, Rogers also sees private-sector opportunities. “We’re doubling down on manufacturing and the whole warehouse management space is a hot area. Also, financial services has been very much ‘build-your-own’ but these organisations are looking to streamline their performance.”

More broadly, SAP will target small and medium-sized enterprises with more products aimed at the sector and a broader reseller channel.

“The objective is to double the size of the organisation by the end of 2010 and to grow the slice of SME revenue share from in the twenties to nearly 50 percent,” Rogers said.

However, SAP’s blue-chip stamping ground can also be more profitable, Rogers believes.

“There’s a suggestion that the enterprise is saturated but that’s so far away from the truth that it’s ridiculous. Many of these organisations have only bought a fraction of the footprint that is available. There is an opportunity to get closer to the enterprise guys and compete with niche providers because customers are telling us they want to consolidate providers all the way through the supply chain. Service-oriented architectures open up the landscape and we believe it will be possible for SAP to provide 100 percent of the application needs of our customers in 100 percent of industries.”

Rogers gave a speech at the SAP User Group Conference in Birmingham in November where user group chairman Glynn Lowth suggested the company is entering a new phase.

“People are seeing SAP has developed in leaps and bounds to a comprehensive landscape where what was R/3 is now just a component,” Lowth said. “The easy things such as transaction professing have been done and the things left to address are in the ‘too difficult’ pile – things like linking up disparate processes such as plant maintenance and purchasing.”