New | SAP to expand 'cloud' alliance with China Telecom on the mainland
German IT giant plans to broaden its cloud computing collaboration with China Telecom
German technology giant SAP will step up investments on the mainland this year in anticipation of rising software sales, spurred by increased spending of state-owned enterprises (SOEs) and small businesses.
That initiative will be led by the expansion of SAP's co-operation with China Telecom in so-called cloud-computing services, which deliver software over the internet on a subscription basis to customers.
SAP, the world's biggest supplier of business-management software, saw information technology expenditure by SOEs pick up steam in the second half of last year, after a sluggish first six months, which helped the company record "outstanding double-digit growth" for the full year, SAP Greater China president Mark Gibbs said on Wednesday.
Gibbs declined to break down SAP's revenue on the mainland, but said the company "added about 100 new customers on average every quarter last year, which gave us an optimistic outlook moving forward".
Big contracts won by SAP last year included cloud-computing implementations at the Agricultural Bank of China, China Minsheng Banking Corp and China Petroleum and Chemical Corp, also known as Sinopec.
"We saw 427 per cent year-on-year growth from the banking industry, 267 per cent year-on-year growth in oil and gas, and 131 per cent in retail," Gibbs said. He added that SAP had about 100 mainland customers at the end of last year on its high-end "Hana" platform, a technology that allows companies to process massive amounts of data faster than on traditional database software.