Intelligent CIO Middle East Issue 37 | Page 54

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 54 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. www.intelligentcio.com