Software AG, a $33 billion-valued German business software company, announced its entry into Nigeria’s 960 billion naira ($6 billion) software market over the weekend, according to a BusinessDay report.
The software company said it is engaged in strategic partnership with Northern Spark, a Nigeria-based Information Technology (IT) company, to gain market share in West Africa, using Nigeria as a strategic position to penetrate other markets in the region.
Speaking at a seminar entitled: ‘Achieving Business Excellence with AG’s Enterprise software’, Barry De Waal, VP, Software AG Africa, said: “Our goal is to take over the whole of West Africa and we are starting with Nigeria which is the largest market here.”
He furthered, revealing the company’s strategy to face competition in the Nigerian market using local support and capacity development. “This is very critical for us going forward. It is one of the things Software AG and Northern Spark agreed on from the beginning,” Waal said.
Northern Spark GM, Bob Anderson, said the partnership intends to play a fundamental role in Central Bank of Nigeria’s (CBN) ‘Cashless Nigeria Project’. He indicated that the apex bank’s planned migration to a cashless economy will witness an emergence of significant challenges for financial institutions due to the high volumes of online transactions.
Only today, Mr. Reginald Ihejiahi, MD/CEO Fidelity Bank Plc, a Nigeria-based lender, disclosed the bank’s volume of electronic funds transactions increased significantly to 10 trillion naira ($63 billion) in the first nine months of the year.
Software AG, the business data processor which had revenues of more than €1 billion ($1.3 billion) in 2011, stated that its technologies will enable efficient processing of these high transaction volumes to low ranges.
Other Options
“We are not confined to finance. Let’s look at the oil and gas industry, specifically pipeline management. There is huge amount of data coming out. Businesses can go into big data and extract information very rapidly and efficiently. The telecoms industry, what is the state of the network across the country? With the amount of data coming through, you need high speed availability to figure what is going on and make better decision that can improve the business. It is just as applicable to finance as it is to telecoms and oil and gas industry”, Anderson disclosed.
With Nigeria being the sixth oil producer in the world and its telecom industry leading in Africa, the country represents huge data analysis business opportunities for the German maker.
Reuters reveals the parent company with a loose capital of up to 1 billion euros ($1.3 billion) is seeking to acquire companies in the business of cloud computing or in big data analysis, according to Arnd Zinnhardt, Software AG’s finance director.
Founded in 1969, Software AG is an enterprise software company with over 10,000 enterprise customers in over 70 countries. The company is the second largest software vendor in Germany, the fourth in Europe and among the top 25 globally.
