BUSINESS COMPUTING
DON SAMBANDARAKSA
SAP Thailand will focus on the CRM market this year with the launch of CRM 2007 in Thailand and is determined to grow its market for enterprise software faster than the 80 billion baht IT market as a whole.
Speaking at the Thailand SAP Summit 2008, SAP Thailand and Philippines country manager Patra Yongvanich said that with increasing competition means that customer relationship management was an important part of everything we buy today and the initial sale is simply the start of a long relationship.
For instance, a telco like True Move can use its customer database to cross-sell cable and coffee at its True Coffee shops and in any relationship there is the opportunity to cross sell and upsell.
Another example of the need for better CRM is how laws in the West now limit the way pharmaceutical companies can entertain doctors, so the only way salespeople can encourage a sale is to have all the data at their fingertips on a notebook PC or PDA, instead of taking the doctor on a golfing holiday.
Patra said that SAP has invested hundreds of millions of euros into the new user interface, which can be accessed through a variety of ways, including Microsoft Outlook which many people spend most of their working days on.
He said that the cooperation with Adobe was particularly important for Thailand which still has Internet connectivity issues. A user can download active forms to fill in and then later at the office upload the forms into the CRM system.
However, no mention was made of the much vaunted SAP CRM for BlackBerry solution which was one of the highlights of Sapphire in Berlin.
"In Thailand, BlackBerry use is starting to increase. If you land at Suvarnabhumi, half the people are getting their BlackBerries out to respond to email. But the BlackBerry is still expensive, carriers are limited and not many companies have invested in a BlackBerry infrastructure. Many smaller SMEs run their own POP3 mail servers and push mail to Nokias.
"From a SAP perspective, we have to invest in what is most appropriate, and I think BlackBerry will be part of the roadmap, but for now the focus is on the notebooks for mobile sales," he said.
Asked if the delays in SAP's Software as a Service offering, SAP Business By Design, had delayed the Thai roll-out, Patra said that there was no Thai roll-out planned at all.
Localisation of Business By Design (for Thai business and tax laws) was not a priority as Thailand still lacked a reliable Internet infrastructure for SaaS.
As for the economic slowdown, Patra reiterated his stance that there was no slow-down from his point of view, and even if there was, many companies invest in IT as it will help them gain market share from the competition in times of turmoil.
Earlier, Eric MacDonald, president of SAP South East Asia spoke of the flat world and how economic changes in one corner of the globe can have profound effects here in Thailand, be it the decline in the US dollar, the potential of a US recession and whether or whether China's growth will continue to be sustained, and how investing in SAP will allow operational excellence and the ability to innovate new business models.
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