According to a survey conducted at the recent SAP User Group Middle East and North Africa (SUG-MENA) Executive Exchange held during joint SAP Forum and SUG-MENA conferences in Riyadh, Doha and Dubai, 95% of business leaders surveyed agreed that the role of the CEO and CFO was integral to making strategic technology decisions in 2012, the company said.
Top of the wish-list for those looking to give their business strategy and IT a boost was business analytics (86%), followed by on-device mobile technology (67%) and cloud computing (23%), SAP MENA executives said.
There was also a healthy awareness of the need to deal with the challenge of aggregating, processing and acting on Big Data (23%), the company added.
“Executive leaders in the region aspire to be ahead of the business curve. IT technology is the springboard for transforming this ambition into profitable reality,” said Salem Al Angari, president of SUG-MENA.
SUG-MENA is an independent and non profit entity that brings the SAP user community together to help SAP address the concerns of the MENA region. The presence of Jim Hagemann Snabe, Co-CEO and executive board member of SAP was also present at the event.
Sam Alkharrat, Managing Director, SAP MENA, added, “These are exciting times, and we are committed to helping the SAP user community grow and adopt technology innovation that can genuinely make a difference. In addition to business analytics, mobile apps and cloud-based solutions, this is likely to include solutions capable of dealing with the Big Data challenge such as SAP HANA, a ground-breaking platform rooted in-memory computing that facilitates the real-time analysis of large, non-aggregated data at unprecedented speeds.”