SAP looks to hire 400 people by 2014 in Nearshore Delivery Center

SAP Romania, a subsidiary of SAP AG, has announced the opening of its nearshore delivery center in Romania, which will provide consultancy services to customers across Europe, the Middle East and Africa (EMEA). SAP aims to employ 400 consultants at the facility by 2014.

“The reasons why we chose Romania are very simple. A nearshore center needs to have scalability, good universities and language advantages: Latin languages are not so widely spoken in Eastern Europe outside Romania. Moreover, Romania is the third largest country in Europe and part of the European Union. Of course, the lower level of salaries in Romania compared to the Western market that we are serving is also advantageous for us. The salary a consultant starts on is at least twice the average salary in Romania,” Gheorghe Olteanu, director of the SAP nearshore center Romania, told Business Review.

The company has announced that it will invest between EUR 30 million and EUR 40 million, which will cover all the costs, including training programs for employees and the cost of the headquarters.

The new facility builds on the former center for the SAP Global Delivery group, part of SAP Consulting, located in Bucharest, and will join two other Romanian offices in Timisoara and Cluj.
“In Timisoara and Cluj we will have centers from where we will act using local resources; they will be working points and they will report to Bucharest,” said the director.

The SAP nearshore center will deliver its services primarily to the mature markets of Western and Central Europe to support customer projects in Austria, Belgium, Germany, Luxembourg, the Netherlands and Switzerland.
“Such centers contribute significantly to the delivery of services, with reduced total costs of investment and ownership, as well as improved quality, speed and scalability for our customers,” said Franck Cohen, EMEA president at SAP.

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SAP aims to hire over 100 consultants annually over the next two years in Romania, through both the regular recruitment process and via the SAP Academy program conducted in cooperation with the leading universities in Romania. Training varies from six to eighteen months, and depends on the specialization.

“Developers are the easiest to train. It is more complicated to train business consultants as such,” Olteanu told BR. Potential employees will be paid from the time when they start their training. “After they finish their studies and prove they are capable of learning the ropes, the financial package increases because we need to keep them interested,” added the director.
SAP officials insisted this would not be a call center or support center, but a center of IT consultancy with engineering activities, where employees will receive complex training. The nearshore delivery center in Romania along with one planned in Portugal will be the two first SAP near-shore locations in Europe. Both facilities will serve customers around the continent.

SAP had a worldwide turnover of EUR 12.46 billion last year, and is a strong player in the public sector. In Romania, data from the Ministry of Public Finances show that SAP posted a turnover of EUR 16.8 million (RON 73.1 million) in 2010.

“One of the areas where SAP has developed very specific solutions is the public sector, for which we have developed solutions such as eGovernment, smart cities, health, tax management solutions and so on. My question would be: why don’t you use SAP’s expertise in the public sector to help the development of the country?” said Cohen at a press conference.

However, company representatives have complained that SAP has failed to secure projects in the public sector. “We have lost all the public auctions in Romania over the last four years,” said Cohen, quoted by Hotnews.ro, adding that he does not have an explanation for this. “They should be the ones to explain, not me. It is not normal that SAP has not won one auction over the last four years. It is clear that some people are not playing fair in this government.
This has never happened anywhere else in the world, only in Romania,” said Cohen.  

Otilia Haraga