Nazia Pillay, Interim Managing Director for South Africa at SAP, says: “The data is clear: African companies expect the demand for AI skills to increase this year, with six in ten saying AI skills are ‘extremely important’ to their success. The business impact of a lack of AI skills availability is already evident, with 90% of companies in our research citing negative impacts that include project delays, failed innovation initiatives, and an inability to take on new work.”

SAP’s latest report follows an earlier tech skills report released in 2023, which unveiled specific challenges and opportunities for African organisations seeking greater tech skills availability.

“Our first report was conducted just as we exited the worst of the pandemic impact. At the time, companies were facing several challenges with attracting, retaining, and upskilling suitable, qualified tech workers, especially in the wake of the rise of remote and hybrid work environments. This year, the business landscape has been transformed by the impact of AI technologies and the search for relevant skills.”

The research was conducted at the end of 2024 among both mid-size and enterprise-level companies in Kenya, Nigeria, and South Africa.

Universal need for AI skills

Every organisation that was surveyed as part of the research said they expect the demand for AI skills to increase in 2025. All companies are also expected to experience some AI-related skills gap this year. “Skills related to AI are hugely in-demand among African organisations, with 85% saying AI development skills are a priority, and 83% prioritising Generative AI skills. To help close the AI skills gap, two-thirds of organisations are introducing career development initiatives with AI specialisation to upskill or reskill employees.”

Overall, the most in-demand tech skill among African organisations is cybersecurity. “Eighty-six percent of companies said cybersecurity skills were important to them, a significant increase over the 63% that said the same in our previous research. The growing importance of cybersecurity may be partly explained by the rapid growth of Africa’s digital economy and the millions of citizens that are being brought into the digital fold through public and private sector initiatives.”

Changing workplace expectations

There are far-reaching changes in the expectations of both employers and employees regarding skills and the workplace compared to a few years ago. “Eight in ten African organisations said supporting skilled employees’ requests for hybrid or remote work is their top skills-related challenge this year, a significant increase from only 32% who said the same in our previous survey.“

The non-technical attributes that African organisations look for in potential hires have also evolved. “In 2023, technical skills and industry-specific skills were the top attributes. Affordability was somewhere near the bottom, with less than a third of organisations saying they consider it during the hiring process. This year, affordability is the number one candidate attribute for African organisations, with adaptability a close second.”

Adaptability is essential in light of the need for employees to be upskilled or reskilled with AI skills. “Reskilling is a top skills-related priority for 38% of companies this year, with 48% saying the same of upskilling employees. Unsurprisingly, two-thirds of companies said helping employees understand why reskilling is necessary is one of the top challenges this year.”

Training, skills development in the spotlight

Pillay says companies are stepping up their IT training and skills development efforts to help meet the demand for skills. “Ninety-four percent of African organisations offer training and skills development to employees at least monthly, an increase from 74% in our last survey. The number of companies offering training opportunities to employees at any time also increased from 28% in our last survey to 37% this year.”

Surprisingly, the portion of companies’ IT or HR budgets allocated to skills-related initiatives has declined since 2023. “The drop in budget allocation for skills development requires an urgent rethink. Organisations that don’t invest in appropriate skills now may find they are unable to leverage innovations and emerging technologies, leaving them trailing their more skills-enabled competitors.”

SAP’s ‘Africa’s AI Skills Readiness Revealed’ report is now available and can be downloaded here

Distributed by African Media Agency (AMA) on behalf of SAP Africa.

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BENGALURU:  Qlik^®, a global leader in data integration, analytics, and artificial intelligence (AI), today announced the expansion of its AI-ready data integration capabilities, delivering new enhancements across SAP, Databricks, and Snowflake. These advancements empower enterprises to streamline data workflows, accelerate AI deployment, and gain faster insights, ensuring that business intelligence is built and scaled on quality, real-time data running on Amazon Web Services (AWS).

As organizations continue to push AI integration deeper into their operations, the demand for robust, seamless data management across platforms has never been greater. Companies need reliable data pipelines that can handle the complexity and volume of data required to fuel effective AI models. Qlik’s latest updates directly address these needs, reducing barriers to AI adoption by simplifying data connections across industry-leading platforms.

“Enterprises know that to truly leverage AI, they need high-quality, accessible data. Our latest enhancements build on Qlik’s strong integration foundation, making it easier for companies to get their data AI-ready, whether they are utilizing SAP systems, Databricks, or Snowflake,” said Drew Clarke, Executive Vice President and General Manager of Qlik’s Data Business Unit. “With these new capabilities, we’re providing the reliable, real-time data environment businesses need to innovate with confidence.”

New Capabilities Include:

• Expanded SAP OData Support: Enhanced integration with SAP Rise and SAP Cloud, facilitating smoother cloud migrations and enabling better data extraction for richer insights and improved operational efficiency.
• AI-Ready Components for Databricks: Improved connectivity to seamlessly link real-time data with advanced AI models, allowing for faster and more precise deployments.
• Real-Time Data Connections for Snowflake: New integration enhancements that accelerate the deployment of AI insights within the Snowflake ecosystem, optimizing performance and supporting faster decision-making.

These updates represent an important step in Qlik’s ongoing mission to allow enterprises to achieve tangible AI outcomes. Beyond integration, Qlik’s platform offers a comprehensive AI value chain, including advanced analytics capabilities like Qlik Answers, which transform unstructured data into actionable insights. By providing a robust, end-to-end solution, Qlik ensures that organizations can seamlessly move from data collection to analytics, and finally to AI-driven decision-making.

Qlik’s latest capabilities demonstrate its commitment to supporting businesses at every stage of their AI journey, from preparing data to deploying insights that drive innovation and operational agility. As companies navigate the complex landscape of AI adoption, Qlik’s focus on data integrity, flexibility, and accessibility gives them a competitive edge. To learn more, please book a time to connect with the Qlik team at AWS re:Invent December 2-6, 2024 in Las Vegas.

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The Cisco Observability Platform provides capabilities to surround telemetry data with context, so organizations get both insight and the ability to take specific action(s). Partners are already seeing value in the platform and developing modules to help customers derive value from their observable telemetry. By building and offering solution sets on the platform, partners can assist in providing the observability needs of Cisco’s customer base.

The new modules are focused on five critical areas: Business Insights, SAP Visibility, Networking, MLOps & SLO, and Sustainability. The modules are designed to help customers achieve their specific observability needs and utilize additional value from observable telemetry. The platform provides contextual, correlated, and predictive insights that allow customers to resolve performance issues more quickly and optimize digital experiences while minimizing business risk.

The Cisco Observability Platform is a vendor-agnostic solution that harnesses the power of the company’s full portfolio. It delivers a new observability ecosystem that brings data together from multiple domains, including applications, networking, multi-cloud infrastructure, cloud services, security, endpoints, sustainability, and business sources.

The addition of these new modules to the Cisco Observability Platform will help customers fulfill their specific observability needs and utilize additional value from observable telemetry. The platform provides contextual, correlated, and predictive insights that allow customers to resolve performance issues more quickly and optimize digital experiences while minimizing business risk.

However, according to a recent IDC report, 60% of IT professionals are worried that most observability tools serve narrow requirements, failing to give IT teams a complete view into current and trending operating conditions. Further, 65% stated the need for a programmable and extensible observability solution that could be used for use cases specific to their own business.

New partner modules are focused on five critical themes:

• Business Insights: Correlate telemetry data with business performance across multiple domains, providing customers with full visibility and insights on how business interacts with IT.
• SAP Visibility: Help customers achieve holistic observability across often changeable, expanding and complex SAP landscapes and ecosystems.
• Networking: Leverage Cisco’s networking expertise to correlate key network telemetry with business metrics and application stack.
• MLOps and SLO: With the growing use of generative AI and the mainstream of modern applications, the Cisco Observability Platform helps customers to monitor these applications, and their SLO and bring the monitoring of large language models (LLMs), and MLOps models together with application observability.
• Sustainability: Help customers achieve their sustainability goals by providing data around the carbon footprint across multiple IT domains and help optimize energy consumption.

Partners are already seeing value in the Cisco Observability Platform and developing modules to help customers derive value from their observable telemetry. By building and offering solution sets on the Platform, partners can assist in providing the observability needs of Cisco’s customer base.

The following modules are available on the Cisco Observability Platform exchange at Partner Summit:

• CloudFabrix – SAP Observability: Enables customers to ingest data from Cisco AppDynamics agents for SAP Monitoring. It correlates telemetry data and asset types together to isolate the root cause of issues in the SAP landscape and determine the effect of impacted services on the business.
• CloudFabrix – Campus Analytics: Provides network analytics for campus environments as employees return to offices. This module aggregates multiple Cisco DNA Controller analytics to provide near real-time network topology information, bandwidth consumption and hotspot visibility.
• Evolutio – Claims: Insurance institutions are looking to gather multiple claims processes in a single pane of glass to best understand process health and user experience. The module helps to correlate and view the health of different claims processes in real-time as it relates to product types, underwriters, regions, and business units.
• Evolutio – eCommerce: With the growth of e-commerce and the technology that powers it, organizations need a solution to track every part of the shopping experience. This module allows the correlation by product category or region, by monitoring of orders, shipping, inventory, and payments to quickly identify issues against the supporting infrastructure and applications.
• DataRobot – MLOps by Evolutio: Extends observability for both predictive AI and generative AI, with always-on monitoring and production diagnostics to track and improve the performance of your models. Stay informed of key metrics like service health, accuracy and data drift.
• Nobl9 – Service Level Objectives (SLO): Provides a platform for defining and creating SLO for understanding reliability across organizations and sharing remaining error budgets for given services as well as SLO-related visualizations for workloads.
• Climatiq – Cloud Carbon Insights: Adds carbon emission tracking to existing cloud metrics and enables analyzing, comparing, and benchmarking emissions data. These actionable insights accelerate journeys to net zero and make more environmentally conscious decisions.

In addition, the following modules will be available soon:

• Cisco CX – Sustainability Insights: Provides a sustainability portal that acts as a single pane of glass for near real-time interactive visualizations, measurement, estimation, and reporting of key infrastructure sustainability indicators, trended over time, aiming for workload and datacenter energy optimization.
• Aporia – MLOps: A significant number of challenges faced by ML models in production arise from a combination of data inconsistencies and the software infrastructure they operate on. The module will not only offer a holistic view of the model’s performance but also empowers teams to swiftly identify, dive deeper into, and resolve issues faster.

Cisco is committed to fostering innovation in observability and building an observability ecosystem that will help companies deliver exceptional digital experiences. The platform has the potential to provide a diverse set of solutions that can help customers reduce tool sprawl and more proactively manage business operations through partner-led observability practices.

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Tracy Bolton, Chief Operating Officer at SAP Africa, says the additional skills capacity comes at a critical time for the region. “Ongoing economic uncertainty, inflationary pressures, and the impact of new technologies such as Generative AI are creating challenges for organizations seeking to unlock growth and drive innovation. With this latest group of candidates, organizations gain access to work-ready cloud and technology skills that can support their digital transformation efforts.”

Organizations throughout Southern Africa are beset with multiple challenges to their growth. Economic growth in the region stood at 2.7% in 2022, well below the global growth of 3.4% and the 3.8% growth experienced throughout Africa. Business leaders are also striving to meet sustainability targets and deal with the impact of disruptive technologies, including the emergence of Generative AI and its application in a broad range of business cases.

However, organizations are hampered in their efforts to deploy technology to support their response to challenges through a pervasive tech skills shortage. In skills research conducted by SAP, nearly eight in ten (78%) organizations in the region said a lack of tech skills had impacted them in the past twelve months, with a lack of innovation, delays in completing projects, and a loss of clients to competitors among the most common impacts.

The SAP Young Professionals Program covers software functional and technical knowledge and certification, with a strong focus on the latest technologies and a range of soft skills to ease entry into the workplace. This latest cohort received training on SAP S/4HANA Cloud (public edition), SAP’s flagship enterprise resource planning solution, as well as SAP Activate and SAP Business Process Integration. In addition, graduates developed a broad range of soft skills, including design thinking, interpersonal skills, interview skills, and business model innovation methodology.

Candidates took part in training between early July and August and were chosen from a pool of candidates in South Africa and Zimbabwe. The full program took place virtually, allowing a broader range of candidates to take part.

Letlolo Baloyi, who is one of the graduates in this latest group, says: “The SAP Young Professionals Program has been nothing short of a catalyst for my personal and professional growth. Through a meticulously crafted blend of immersive learning experiences, mentorship, and hands-on projects, the program has equipped me with a comprehensive understanding of SAP’s innovative technologies and their real-world applications.“

Since its launch in 2012, the SAP Young Professionals Program has trained and graduated more than 4100 candidates across 41 countries, including over 1900 in Africa alone.

Bolton adds: “The program is aimed at supporting our customers and partners in the region by ensuring they have access to essential skills needed to benefit from their investment into technology and forms part of our broader global commitment to promoting education and entrepreneurship. We wish the graduates well and look forward to the positive impact they will make at their new workplaces.“

The SAP Young Professionals Program is a vital initiative that equips young talent with the necessary skills to support digital transformation efforts in Southern Africa. With the region facing multiple challenges to its growth, the program’s graduates are well-positioned to make a positive impact in their new workplaces.

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Drawing on the unique depth and breadth of the SAP Business Technology Platform (SAP BTP), SAP Build is a low-code solution that puts SAP’s world-class enterprise technology in the hands of business users, giving them direct, secure access to the end-to-end processes, data and context they need to make smarter decisions and drive innovation quickly. The offering empowers business users with minimal technical expertise to create and augment enterprise applications, automate processes, and design business sites with drag-and-drop simplicity.

“SAP Build brings together the world’s most powerful business applications with a platform that’s been designed to rapidly unleash business users’ expertise,” said Juergen Mueller, member of the Executive Board and Chief Technology Officer of SAP. “In a volatile business landscape, SAP Build and the full suite of innovations we’re launching today – from our new partnership with Coursera to enhancements across our enterprise portfolio – help customers future-proof their business and extract maximum value from their technology investments.”

With SAP Build, business users have the full power of SAP BTP and business application data from SAP at their fingertips. Users can easily integrate systems; intelligently monitor, analyze, and automate processes; and build applications for the last mile of innovation – all without moving their data into an external system. With SAP Signavio solutions natively integrated, SAP Build users also get in-depth visibility into all their processes, so they know where to focus to achieve the greatest impact as they innovate and automate. More than 275,000 process reference points from 4,000 customers, as well as 1,300 use-case-specific workflows and automation, let users instantly tap into the full spectrum of business expertise built into SAP’s technology. SAP Build also works with non-SAP systems. And the new SAP Builders program helps users ramp up quickly and connect with their peers via hands-on sessions and forums for sharing best practices.

“Given that the demand for contemporary digital solutions is greater than the ability of professional developers to supply them, IDC envisions that business professionals will become increasingly involved in initiatives to create digital solutions to solve pressing business problems,” said Arnal Dayaratna, Research Vice President, Software Development, IDC. “Worldwide, IDC expects more than 100 million business professionals will become involved in the production of digital solutions over the next ten years. SAP Build’s low-code development solutions empower business users to harness their domain expertise to rapidly build and iterate on digital solutions at scale.”

SAP Build is already demonstrating impact. “Thanks to SAP Build we easily built a better experience for our customers while dramatically reducing our development costs by 90%,” said Spencer Cook, XM Advocates Lead at Qualtrics, a leading experience-management company. “I was able to quickly build the application to enhance our customer reference program which is going to catapult customer satisfaction.”

As every company becomes a technology company, SAP also recognizes the increasing premium put on the skills and insights only professional developers can deliver. SAP is committed to upskilling two million developers worldwide by 2025 by tripling free learning offerings on the SAP Learning site, partnering with world-class learning platform provider Coursera Inc. to help people launch careers within the SAP ecosystem, and empowering underserved audiences in technology.

“I’m happy to announce that today SAP is launching an entry-level professional certificate on Coursera. This certificate is designed for learners of all backgrounds, with no college degree or industry experience required,” said Jeff Maggioncalda, CEO of Coursera Inc. “It will prepare learners for entry-level job roles and in some of the most in-demand fields. We’re honored to partner with SAP to increase access to job-related skills and to expand economic opportunity for everyone.”

These announcements come amid a host of innovations announced at SAP TechEd to help SAP customers and partners continue driving the transformations they need to stay successful. From an all-new native Web entry point for business apps, which increases productivity in the cloud and out of the box, to innovations across intelligent SAP applications, SAP Digital Supply Chain solutions, and SAP solutions for sustainability– at SAP TechEd 2022 we’re unleashing the power of business

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