SAP Custom Development (Center of custom developments)

For September, 2015 SAP has 14 centers of custom software development:

• in Germany,
• USA,
• Brazil and
• countries of Asia (cities of Bangalore, Delhi, Shanghai).

Earlier the company reported that about 50% of custom software development provide development centers in India. Clients of SAP in this direction in 2015 are BMWs, Hyundai, Siemens, etc.

2015: Hiring of 8 developers in Moscow

On September 9, 2015 SAP announced opening in Moscow of the center of custom software development.

"Work of the new center will begin with eight developers who will be focused not only on creation of local products taking into account specifics of the Russian clients and the Russian legislation, but also on projects implementation for foreign clients" — reported in SAP.

The company notes that the center will work on problems of automation of specific business processes in the industries, key for economy of Russia.

SAP announced availability of custom software developments to the Russian customers in 2012, however all these years foreign programmers wrote software for the Russian customers.

"We are going to expand staff of the Russian center further especially as dynamics of growth of business of custom developments in Russia is happy high: only for 2014 we had 17 new projects" — Kommersant reported the director of consulting and support of SAP CIS Ara Aguzumtsyan^[1].

2012: Start of service of development for clients in Russia

In May, 2012 the SAP CIS started the new direction in Russia and the CIS on development of custom business applications (SAP Custom Development). The activity of new division will be concentrated around creation of unique solutions for clients of SAP. By 2015, within the strategy of the company on expansion of the business in Russia and the CIS, SAP is going to increase a share of custom developments in revenue breakdown from sale of software to 7%. SAP performs custom developments also in other countries of the world.

Work of SAP Custom Development in Russia will be focused on several tasks, the most relevant for the Russian clients: this development and expansion of functionality of already implemented solutions, the organization of new implementations, the help to clients in the translation of the existing complexes of business applications on a single platform of SAP, technical support and development of information systems.

The novel, in what countries of presence of SAP AG there are also divisions of SAP Custom Development?

There is a lot of such countries: it is, for example, Germany, America, Canada, Japan, England. Normally it is those countries where SAP is present for a long time as the greatest logic in opening of custom developments exists where the number of implementations is rather big.

As far as we know, SAP CIS already has a staff of programmers. What are they engaged in? Whether SAP Customer Development will develop based on this department?

Really, SAP CIS already has a certain staff of programmers who are introduced into the global block of developments of SAP, it totals more than 12 thousand specialists around the world. Other structure which total number of programmers around the world reaches about 1 thousand people is engaged in custom developments, and within this global structure SAP Custom Development works.

What number of employees will work in SAP Custom Development? How you are going to attract and select the personnel?

I cannot give exact numbers yet, it will depend about with what speed our business will develop. There are several scenarios. By and large, at the first stage the task of SAP Custom Development will consist in the requirement specification of the specific customer in the specific project and transfer of these requirements for further developments in global structure.

Whether SAP had examples of projects in Russia where there were already custom developments?

No, such projects were not yet. It is not just about small additional tunings of a system here, and about large volumes of program developments which in further SAP will be able to take on support also, as well as the standard solutions.

SAP means will not compete with the partners in this situation as, by and large, any of them has no competence for implementation of such developments independently?

Quite right, our task consists in taking the place "in the middle". Thanks to SAP Custom Development we expect to promote absolutely new services on the market, to draw attention of customers to automation on the SAP platform in such areas where still nobody did it. For example, now during creation of such systems as, for example, the Unified State Automated Information System, comes to nobody to mind to do them on SAP. However, it more than really.

Whether means it that in respect of custom developments you see some of key customers government institutions?

Certainly, it so.

Opinions of market participants on new structure

As Svetlana Vronskaya, the representative of "Reksoft"[[Vronskaya Svetlana|]] told TAdviser, divisions of Custom Development Services exist in global SAP for a long time and a total quantity of developers in this division about one thousand.

Under opening in Russia, probably, expansion of the development center in the country which is included into division of CDS means, she considers. "SAP, as well as many other global corporations, estimated quality of technical specialists in the field of professional software development in Russia for a long time, having opened the centers in some cities of the country. Possibly, now it is about development of these centers on purpose to providing to clients of SAP in Russia of a full range of implementation services and completions of the existing systems of vendor", - Svetlana Vronskaya noted.

Roman Chernyshev, the vice president for development of DataArt, told TAdviser that the similar step from SAP means recognition of the Russian market strategically important. According to him, the initiative of SAP will have an impact on the Russian market of development as SAP will take away work from integrators and implementers who specialized in implementation and support in the local market.

Depending on degree of aggression, desire to support an ecosystem and the selected resources, SAP can or offer the services directly to clients, or implementers, Roman Chernyshev says, "but also in that and in other case it means that they will take away a part of pie from local players. A question only in that, how big". "But it concerns the market of implementers of SAP. The market of development of custom software in a broad sense will not affect it in any way", - the expert added.

The new player in the market ("especially such powerful") will strengthen the competition, consider also in Arcadia company. "The idea to make the product more flexible, most likely, will add one more "plus" for benefit of SAP when this or that company makes the decision on creation of the corporate IC or on what to do with "zoo". Perhaps, for someone this excess plus will become decisive for the choice of SAP or not to change SAP for something else", - told TAdviser in Arcadia, however, with the clause that you should not dismiss also other large players – IBM, Microsoft and others.

See Also

Main article: SAP CIS

Links

International SAP Customer Development portal