COUNTRY FOCUS: KSA
“
to the expectations of making IT more cost
effective going forward making sure that we
can contribute to the saving the government
is looking for. We anticipate in our studies
that relying on our cloud data centre in
KSA the enterprises using the intelligent
enterprise platform are expected to reduce
time to market by 20-50%.
The IT market is set to reach 33 billion
Saudi Riyals in 2018. It is growing, next
year the economy overall will grow and
IT based on the cloud platform and the
intelligent enterprise is going to contribute
massively to that.
You mentioned the investment
of SAP in KSA and the cloud
data centre, what other forms of
investment has SAP made in KSA?
We are proud that we are supporting
Saudi youth job creation. We have several
programmes towards that direction and we
would like to mention a few. SAP YPP (SAP
Young Professional Programme) has been
in place for the past years and we have
graduated more than 500 students.
Almost 100 students every year, males and
females, are taken through three months of
intensive training. Not only on our solutions,
and not only do they become certified
SAP associates, but we also provide them
with content around soft skills, hard skills,
around how to bridge that gap between the
higher education outcome and the market
demand and the new jobs that are evolving
in the market.
And at the same time in addition to the
YPP, which is part of our Training and
Development Institute, SAP through its
global Next-Gen academic and innovation
community, has so far partnered with
more than 35 academic institutions in the
Kingdom of Saudi Arabia. Faculty members
and students are enabled to innovate with
purpose, linked to the United Nations Global
Sustainability Goals.
We have also recently opened two SAP
Next-Gen Labs in the Kingdom of Saudi
Arabia, where we invite our local ecosystem
to co-innovate with students through
various events and projects. Last, but
not least, as part of our #sheinnovates
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INTELLIGENTCIO
Khaled Alsaleh, Managing Director, SAP KSA
global programme, we have established
an SAP Next-Gen Chapter at Prince Sultan
University, with a focus on gender equality,
to promote STEM education and careers
among girls in KSA.
WE AT SAP
ARE PROUD
TO BE THE
FIRST MULTI-
NATIONAL
IT COMPANY
WORLDWIDE TO
INVEST, BUILD
AND OPERATE
A LOCAL CLOUD
DATA CENTRE.
We also have another programme that is
very selective by the name SAP Academy,
SAP Sales and Pre-sales Academy.
We select a number of students and send
them to our headquarters where they
stay around six months doing intensive
training, on-job training, shadowing experts
around the world so that when they come
back to the Kingdom they are equipped
with all that acquired knowledge and skills
to hit the ground running and to start
contributing to the development of the IT
industry within KSA.
We mostly hire most of the graduates
of our programmes as much as we can
accommodate and at the same time we
conduct a graduation day or celebration for
our students. And we invite all our customers
and partners to that graduation day and
they conduct interviews on the spot on the
same day.
Most of them get hired on the same day.
Others just take a few days or weeks and
then they get hired because of the demand
in the market. This is actually one of the
investments that this SAP is making. That
is part of our commitment to supporting
Saudi youth job creation and also pushing
in the same direction towards Vision 2030
in which addressing the unemployment
ratio is a key pillar.
Is there much of an IT skills gap
in KSA?
The scholarship programme by the
government and by the Ministry
of Higher Education has been very
generous. They have been sending a
massive number of people, thousands
of students studying worldwide in
very advanced and well recognised
universities and they are coming back
with higher education and they are well-
educated in certain areas and they are
filling the gap.
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