ALKHOBAR, 6 June 2006 — It has been just a few months since the merger of the Sage and ACCPAC offices in the Middle East to create a wholly-owned subsidiary of the Sage Group, but Marc Van der Ven, managing director, Sage ACCPAC ME is aggressively moving forward, introducing new products and opening new offices in the region.
“After the merger, we simply have much more to offer. Apart from the fact that we have a larger support infrastructure and more people working for us here, this has given us the ability to plan for the future,” Van der Ven explained. “Most important is that we have made a decision, and are at a very advanced stage of opening up our office in Saudi Arabia in Riyadh. It’s just a matter of a few more papers to be signed and in a month or two, we’ll be there. We do want to focus a lot more on the Saudi market. There are some tremendous opportunities there for us and I think we haven’t been close enough to that market to tap into it effectively.”
Initially, Sage ACCPAC ME’s Saudi office will have sales and marketing specialists, and offer limited support. Since Van der Ven is planning to connect well with local customers, hiring Saudis is a part of the Sage ACCPAC business strategy for the Kingdom. Additionally, the company will have a continuing commitment to Arabization of its software solutions.
“Even before the merger, the decision had been made to localize Sage Abra, which is used for human resources management,” Van der Ven commented. “We took a product from the United States and turned it inside out. We changed the architecture to allow it to support an Arabic interface and we translated it. We have the only product that I’m aware of in the midmarket in this region that offers an international HR solution that has been fully Arabized. This was a strategic commitment from our side. So now we have HR, ERP and CRM solutions that are fully Arabized. Specifically again in Saudi Arabia the need for Arabic HR applications is large. In the past we had a lot of clients who were asking for an Arabized HR solution because there wasn’t one in the market. This is a major opportunity for us and it will be a major focus coming into Saudi Arabia.”
After the merger, partners tended to stick with promoting solutions either from Sage or ACCPAC. In the future that will probably change as individual partners become more familiar with the new company’s total offering. Van der Ven does expect that all partners will, however, be eager to offer the Arabized Sage Abra as there is no similar solution on the market. But even with adding an HR solution to the Sage ACCPAC portfolio, expect that the new company will remain tightly focused on business solutions for medium sized companies.
“We aren’t like some competitors who are typically involved with all sorts of other software solutions,” said Van der Ven. “We just do business solutions — ERP, HR and CRM. That’s all we talk to our clients about all the time and this has given us a very good understanding of our client’s needs. Apart from that, as a company we are very decentralized and there is a lot of authority given to the local operating companies to make decisions based on what we feel is required in our market. There is no single product that we have to sell in this market. We promote products to clients based on what we believe is the best fit.”
All this talk sounded grand, but with the heat of the summer closing in on the Middle East, the implementation of these plans might be nothing more than a mirage.
“I just had an internal discussion about that. I would like all our competitors to think that this is a time that the whole market goes to sleep, because we are the ones who will be out there in the next few months meeting with our customers,” Van der Ven said confidently. “In fact, historically every summer we’ve had very good numbers. So despite the fact that a lot of people go on vacation, there’s still a lot of business out there. With the merger, the launch of the new HR product and the enthusiasm among our partners, there’s a lot of momentum going and we’re going to make the most of it.”