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​A few weeks ago, SAP opened their latest Mission Control Centre on St Kilda Road, Melbourne. As one of five customer support facilities around the globe, it features a tighter integration between on-premise and cloud support, with the 20-operator centre providing around-the-clock customer support for the company’s applications worldwide. SAP has committed to a five-year drive to add 120 jobs to the local operations in Victoria with an estimated $60 million being promised.

So what does it mean exactly for Australians? When it comes to the stats of connections and loading times, others tell it best. For Australian business, the centre allows businesses to fully explore the options of a cloud offering without concerns of data going overseas. This goes hand in hand with Gartner’s prediction of Australia becoming one of the highest growth markets for cloud services in the Asia Pacific region, their research predicting cloud services spending to grow 23.08 per cent annually to reach $5.2bn in 2016, up from $3.2bn last year. And with one of SAP’s major competitors, Oracle having already set up an Australian based centre, with the likes of IBM and Mircosoft following suit, the Centre was inevitable or SAP to fully service the cloud offerings.

Having our own Mission Control Centre is especially good news for those SAP clients who are sensitive about data sovereignty, in particular the Public Sector and those organisations who are obliged to disclose data footprints to government bodies, such as banking and finance companies and telecommunication providers. Being Australian based will provide businesses access to high disaster recovery and security for their data.

“The mission control centre in Melbourne now provides more than 85 Australian and 44 international organisations with real-time, around-the-clock access to SAP’s global network of more than 5,600 support and development experts,” an SAP company statement said.

Real-time customer queries are displayed on the main dashboard at the Centre and it is also decked out with monitoring systems, video conferencing and telepresence installations, with a government-secure facility to cater for federal and state agencies.

Overall its an impressive Centre and we look forward to monitoring its growth as promised over the next 5 years.