Latin America turning into early adopter of technologies, says SAP exec

Latin America's market has shifted from being a follower to an early adopter of technologies and trends, SAP director for South America, Diego Lozano, told BNamericas. According to Lozano, the historical "wait and see" approach to adopting trends from Europe is over, turning the region into a high opportunity center for enterprises like SAP. "SAP in Latin America is growing enormously, over 40% per year. And this can be credited to the fact that the region has changed from been a follower to an early adopter of technology, incorporating these new technologies in a faster way," Lozano said. To keep up with the trend, Lozano said, SAP also has to innovate, and the company is seeking ways to accelerate the incorporation of new technologies. "We recently created a virtual innovation office in Latin America, with no physical location - but led from Argentina - where different [participants] from various countries can share their customer experience. This office means that we no longer have to wait to see the trend in, let's say, Germany, to be adopted in the region.... The idea is to shorten the period of adoption by having the customers' experience here," Lozano added. According to the executive, mobility, data volume increases and cloud computing are the new trends that the company is following to keep growing. "We need to keep offering our services on premises, but also on devices and on demand. This is SAP's new global strategy," he said. SAP also announced the launch of its new strategy to offer SAP Business One, an application that integrates all core business functions across the company, including financials, sales, customer relationship management, inventory and operations. The application, which eliminates the need for separate installations and complex integration of multiple modules, will be offered to small and medium-sized companies.