Two of the world’s largest software companies that play crucial roles in the digital transformation of businesses actually employ thousands of Filipinos in their centers of excellence in the Philippines.
Infor, an American company considered as the third largest provider of enterprise applications and services, has its world’s second largest center of excellence in Bonifacio Global City, Taguig which serves clients around the world. Its largest is in India.
“We have a large center of excellence here. We have more than 1,700 employees here who work at projects around the world,” says Cas Brentjens, the director for solution consulting in Asia Pacific of Infor.
Infor, which took over Lawson Software in 2011, has been in the Philippines since 1998. It has over 300 customers in the Philippines, including the likes of ePerformax and Wilcon Depot Inc. The US company develops business software for specific industries in the cloud. It has 15,000 employees across 168 offices globally, more than 1,650 partners, 1,200 support experts and over 90,000 customers in 194 countries.
Brentjens, a Dutch expatriate who is based in Singapore, says in an interview in Makati City that Infor’s center of excellence in Taguig provides implementation support and development support for clients around the world.
“Our development teams work closely with the team here on building new products and enhancing the products,” says Brentjens. “Almost every function that you can see in a software company, we have presence here, including sales, solution consulting, implementation consulting, development services and implementation services.”
Meanwhile, SAP, a German company widely considered as the world’s largest business software provider, has more than 1,700 customers and over 1,800 employees in the Philippines.
“SAP Philippines started 22 years ago. We started with three employees, one location and one customer. Today, after 22 years, we have more than 1,700 customers. Our employee base, including Concur [Technologies], is in the region of 1,800 employees. And we have four locations across Metro Manila,” says SAP Philippines managing director Ryan Poggi, during the Asian Innovators Summit 2017 at Makati Shangri La Hotel.
“Those locations service not only the sales and operation side of the business, but also the offshore service centers. We have service centers servicing our customers globally in specific solutions sets. We also have our internal shared services base here,” says Poggi, a South African national.
“The last 22 years for SAP in the Philippines has seen tremendous growth, not only in terms of customer side, but also its contribution in terms of employee base to the Philippines,” says Poggi.
Both Infor and SAP believe that companies need to embark on a journey of digital transformation to stay relevant to customers.
Brentjens says companies that fail to join the digital bandwagon run the risk of being left behind. “If you look at the current Fortune 500, 40 percent of those companies were not in the Fortune 500 ten years ago. This also means that a lot of Fortune 500 have been replaced by newer ones. You see enormous growth of new companies becoming the largest companies in the world,” he says.
“There is a risk that companies will become irrelevant if they do not transform. Companies, when they do not transform, will become irrelevant and stay behind,” says Brentjens, in pushing for digital transformation of companies.
Brentjens says digital transformation involves having cloud-based and mobile solutions. “If you look at the elements of digital transformation, it is cloud based, it is often mobile and phone-based business transaction. It is happening everywhere. Everybody has access to the same technology these days. Everybody has access to mobile platform. Everybody has access to e-commerce platform. I think it is happening everywhere,” he says.
Infor saw a 17-percent growth in revenue in the Philippines in 2016, according to Brentjens. “We always want to do better than last year,” he says. The company is promoting its solutions to all industries, particularly asset-intensive industries, service industries, healthcare, tourism, retail, logistics, distribution, manufacturing, financial services and the traditional industries of food and beverage.
Infor has expanded its portfolio of solutions to include artificial intelligence, Internet of Things and data science. Brentjens says these solutions are designed to make jobs easier for people. “Everybody has to emerge and grow. At the moment, a robot can take over a job, that you may think means a loss of job, but you can also think that maybe it is not the job that you really want to have. Someone needs to program the robot, someone needs to maintain the robot. People have to move to the next level of jobs,” he says.
“We see any job is changing as far as digital transformation is concerned, including mine.
Artificial intelligence won’t take jobs away. But someone needs to program artificial intelligence. Everybody’s job is moving on,” he says.
Poggi of SAP says the recent years saw the biggest changes in technology. “Our world is changing. Sometimes, it is said so often that we become immune to that. But the changes are real and they are bringing catch phrases like IoT, digital disruption, digital tsunami, across industries and economies into our daily lives. In the last two years alone, 90 percent of the world’s data has been generated. Over the next two years, there is an expectation of 40 percent growth in the adoption of business networks. By the end of the decade, we expect to see 212 billion things, from cars to heavy equipment to home appliances, being connected,” says Poggi.
Poggi says these changes present opportunities for businesses. “They are opening new markets, creating new routes to revenue and providing unprecedented opportunities for companies,” he says.
Kathleen Muller, an SAP executive who heads its analytics and insights division in Southeast Asia, says the company sees massive opportunities in the Philippines.
“We see this manifest in organizations where the lines are starting to get blurred across industries and across the lines of business. When we talk about massive opportunities, we have an amazing population in the Philippines that is clamoring for the adoption of technology such as transportation platforms, social media platforms to allow us to live better, for us to focus further on most important things which is quality of life and quality of work. That challenges businesses today not just to look at their products and services, but improve the impact of products and services on consumers,” says Muller who grew up in the Philippines.
Poggi says digital technologies now enable small and medium enterprises to catch up with old conglomerates. “What we see in the digital economy is that barriers to entry are reducing, which make competition from the outside much easier. It also means that opportunities for companies now have easier access to much broader market. The opportunity there is much more significant,” says Poggi.
“Roughly 98 percent of our customers are considered SMEs,” he says.
SAP recently launched a suite of IoT solutions as a part of the SAP Leonardo digital innovation system.
A new global study by SAP, supported by Oxford Economics, says 84 percent of global companies believe that digital transformation is important to their survival in the next five years, but only three percent have completed company-wide efforts.
Enterprises in the Philippines, meanwhile, are predicted to attain a macroeconomic scale over the next three to four years.
A study by IDC says that as digital technologies emerge, it will also change the way local organizations operate. By 2020, about 25 percent of top 1,000 companies in the Philippines will be dependent on their ability to create products, services and experiences that are digitally enhanced.
“As Philippine businesses transform to become digital enterprises, it is important for them to recalibrate their approach to technology and understand how digital solutions can help them intelligently connect people, things and processes across the enterprise. This is the winning mindset that will help them become digital leaders in their respective industries and we are excited to work with our customers to help them define their digital future,” says Poggi.