My first contact with SAP was in 1996, when I was promoted to CIO of CELPA, a 2M customer power utility in the Amazon region. At that time, legacy systems I was in charge of were not attending growing maintenance demand and there was a huge pressure for changes. I was convinced that SAP should our best option in the market. But SAP solutions were running on very few utilities in Brazil, high pricing and poor localization were still challenging, and midsize companies CIOs like me could only dream about it...
Year after year, SAP started gaining marketshare, and many utilities all over the country have started implementing ERP and CCS. Unfortunately, my dream as a CIO was not fulfilled, and I have finally left the company in 2003, without having SAP running there. CELPA has implemented ERP only in 2008, when I was already working as Sales & Marketing Director at Logica (now CGI), a SAP implementation partner. Then, my new dream became "I want to work at SAP!". I was really thrilled and motivated to start working for a company that was fastly conquering new customers and dominating the utilities sector in the country...
Well, this time it became true in July 2013, when I joined SAP as IVE for Utilities, and in Q2 2014, I became very proud and happy to be part of SAP team that has turned this company into a true and consolidated market leader in Brazil, with recent outstanding wins at Equatorial group (CELPA and CEMAR) and CEEE: SAP CCS will now serve 53% of total 74M power consumers and SAP ERP will run on 25 of 35 largest Brazilian DisCos (over 200,000 consumers)! Among Generation companies, SAP ERP is also a market leader, running on largest 4 hydro plants that together supply almost all energy demand in the country.
Utilities in a Box, Cloud and more affordable, flexible and simple solutions are already being offered to prospects, and as SAP is developing new business models to conquer small-mid size utilities, a market still dominated by legacy and local software suppliers solutions, these numbers will keep growing!
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