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SAP has appointed Subramanian (Subbu) Ananthapadmanabhan as senior vice president and head of mid-market across Asia Pacific and Japan (APJ), replacing Claus Andresen who will now lead a newly established cloud success services unit regionally.
Effective immediately, Subbu will lead a regional team helping small and medium enterprises (SME) leverage intelligent enterprise solutions alongside driving the vendor’s go-to-market strategy with a specific focus on cloud hyper-growth, identifying and building opportunities in new market segments and driving customer lifetime value.
Subbu was previously head of mid-market for SAP India, where he built a customer-centric, partner-first business. Before joining SAP in 2012, he held leadership positions at Oracle and IBM.
Meanwhile, the new cloud success services unit was established this year and brings together a global workforce of more than 20,000 people with the aim of helping customers maximise value in the cloud at every single touchpoint across the SAP portfolio.
The unit works with Fortune 500 companies, start-ups, and SMEs across the region to ensure they extract maximum value from the vendor’s enterprise software.
Today, SAP’s APJ channel consists of over 2,000 partners across all market units and lines of business. Last September, IDC figures revealed SAP led the way in the 2020 global enterprise applications market as the vendor making the most revenue at US$18.1 billion, yet only making up 7.5 per cent of the total market.
Furthermore, SAP and Qualtrics recently rolled out a new program to create an experience management centre of excellence (COE) in Singapore, supported by the Singapore Economic Development Board (EDB) and S$14.1 million of investment.
Billed as a first of its kind in Asia, the new facility aims to “develop the experience management discipline” across the city-state through a focus on up-skilling industry professionals and building a community of specialised experts.
This is in addition to the creation of 30 new roles — spanning experience management scientists and researchers, business architects, and digital supply chain practitioners — alongside increasing efforts to attract local and international companies to “drive innovation”.
