BackOffice Associates recently announced that it had partnered up with Knowledge Integration Dynamics to deliver two SAP (News - Alert) accelerator applications to customers in Africa. The move is in response to a growing demand for SAP solutions in the area and allows BackOffice Associates to fulfill its obligations to SAP as a global reseller.
South Harwich, Mass.-based BackOffice Associates, LLC (BOA) develops solutions that allow companies to ensure the quality and integrity of their data assets and solutions to facilitate transfer of data between different environments. The company has an impressive list of customers including Kraft Foods Group, Eli Lilly and Company, and Bentley Motors Ltd.
Knowledge Integration Dynamics (KID) is a Johannesburg, South Africa-based consulting firm that installs solutions that integrate data from different sources, maintain data quality, and manage non-transactional data. It has consulted major companies including Vodacom (News - Alert), MediCross, Cell C and Spoornet.
The two BOA solutions that KID will install and integrate in the African market are dspMonitor and dspMigrate. With dspMonitor, data admins can get a variety of detailed reports related to managing data quality. DspMigrate provides a framework for migration projects that ensures that the migrated data has the same integrity and structure it did before migration. Both provide huge time savings for what used to be largely manual processes prone to error.
SAP intends to invest heavily in the African market. It announced back in August that it would commit about $500 billion to the region by 2020. The company’s plans included promoting its SAP HANA solution and providing training programs to develop a skilled workforce in the area.
According to an SAP Africa Web page, staple industries like telecom, banking, retail, construction, and agriculture account for much of the economic growth in the region. Other companies like GE, IBM (News - Alert) and Google have also made significant investments in Africa.
If SAP can have the same success in Africa that it did in other regions, then the relationship between BOA and KID should be a fruitful one. Enterprise databases are often a complex arrangement of data entities, relationships and rules and any solutions that automate their transfer and management should be in high demand.
Edited by Rory J. Thompson