SAP Africa has announced the appointment of Goutam Dev as its new head of education for Africa.
Dev, who has been with the enterprise services leader since 2005, has held various leadership roles in services, sales, strategy, and general management across a range of geographies.
SAP Education is the world’s largest IT education provider and a recognized market leader, successfully delivering customer and partner enablement.
According to Dev, the digital skills gap is cited as one of the top barriers to digital transformation among SAP Africa’s customers and partners. “As a business, it is our stated objective to help companies with their digital transformation initiatives.
“By combining SAP’s broad range of knowledge offerings in both a classroom and digital setting, we aim to focus on driving a comprehensive, rapid, and easy-to-consume learning and enablement strategy, which we see as being key to our customers’ success and growth in Africa. Further, by extending the reach of enablement across the continent, we are able to unlock the tremendous growth potential in Africa, which is the largest market for SAP Education in the EMEA region.”
Prior to his new role, Dev served as the chief of staff to the office of the SAP Africa CEO where he was responsible for the execution and strategic decisions of the CEO across all lines of business and across 54 African countries. In this capacity,
Dev was also responsible for providing advisory services to the business, especially around direction and impact of strategic decisions. Dev has also held business consulting roles with major corporations across a broad range of industries in mature markets like Japan and United States and the emerging markets like India and Middle East.
Dev will continue to drive the strategic investments and growth initiatives on the continent on behalf of SAP, especially in light of Africa’s importance as one of the strategic fast growth markets for the business. Within this, he will support SAP’s transformational initiatives in Africa, helping leading enterprises and governments to use SAP’s disruptive technological innovations to fuel growth and innovation.
Interim SAP Africa MD Claas Kuehnemann says: “With the increasing complexity of the business environment, and rapidly evolving technology, tomorrow’s knowledge worker will need the ability to constantly upskill to meet new business challenges. We have seen rapid adoption of SAP S/4HANA within our customer base, and see the appointment of Goutam Dev as a great opportunity to help our customers derive maximum ROI with the help of our SAP Education software and service portfolio.”