Business
SAP Wins Top Spot in Prestigious Startup Europe Partnership Awards (MESA)
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The SAP Startup Focus program won first place in the Startup Europe Partnership (SEP) “Europe’s Corporate Startup Stars,” an initiative promoted by the European Commission to recognize Europe’s top startup-friendly companies. The awards were presented during a ceremony this week in Brussels.
“Now in its sixth year, SAP Startup Focus was founded to enable emerging companies to join our innovation ecosystem and bring new technologies to market,” said Manju Bansal, SAP vice president and global head of SAP Startup Focus. “Winning the SEP Europe’s Corporate Startup Star award is a testament that our global startup initiative, with members from more than 60 countries, continues to inspire startups to use the power of SAP platform technologies to develop the solutions of tomorrow.”
Established by the Commission’s Startup Europe Partnership initiative, the SEP awards recognized 36 companies for their efforts collaborating with startups and encouraging open innovation. Twelve companies were named “Corporate Startup Stars.” Another 24 were recognized as “Open Innovation Challengers.” The competition is organized by open innovation advisory firm Mind the Bridge with the support of the UK-based innovation foundation Nesta.
“The Judging Committee called out SAP’s holistic approach and global presence, along with the company’s strong commitment to procurement and its active role as a M&A player, as influencing its first-place position,” said Alberto Onetti, Mind the Bridge chairman and Startup Europe Partnership coordinator.
SAP Startup Focus supports startups in developing new applications on SAP technology, including SAP Cloud Platform and the SAP HANA platform, among others. The program is an accelerator for enterprise-centric startups focusing on the Big Data, predictive and real-time analytics space.
So far, more than 6,100 startups have engaged with the program, which began in mid-2012. Since then its members have delivered more than 288 validated solutions that address discrete customer needs across multiple industries.
Startups remain focused on using SAP technology platforms to deliver next-generation solutions in a wide range of areas including real-time simulations and pattern recognition, blockchain, personalized analytics, machine learning, artificial intelligence, augmented and virtual reality, and Internet of Things (IoT) solutions.
