The European software giant SAP has confirmed that it will leave the Russian market, thus joining a long list of technology companies that have left or are about to leave Russia, after this country has invaded Ukraine. This announcement of definitive cessation of operations was preceded by another at the beginning of March, in which the company announced the suspension of sales of its products to the country.
In this new statement, SAP points out that it is going acerr all its operations in the cloud in Russia, in addition to finishing the support to the clients that it had in the country, and the maintenance of its products locally. It does so as one of its main competitors, Oracle, did a few days ago, after Ukraine’s Minister of Digital Transformation, Mykhailo Fedorov, specifically asked both companies to exit the Russian market, as well as the Belarusian one.
It is possible that the blow to SAP by making this decision will not be very high, since according to Reuters, the combination of the Russian, Belarusian and Ukrainian markets only accounts for 1.5% of the company’s total revenue. Meanwhile, from the company they assure that they continue to believe «that coordinated sanctions between governments are the best way to end the war in Ukraine, and we have put them in place without exception. Today we are announcing deeper steps towards an orderly exit from our operations in Russia, where we have operated for more than 30 years and where we have built an excellent team. As we scale back our operations, we will focus on responsibly managing the impact on these employees.«.
As announced, SAP will work with cloud customers who are not sanctioned to offer them three possibilities: the deletion of their data, the sending of the same or its transfer to a third-party data center outside of Russia. Customers who have SAP software on premises will be able to continue using it, but the company has already notified them that it plans stop all your support and maintenance. Also that it is «evaluating multiple options to execute this decision, and all will ensure that we continue to fulfill our obligations to clients who are not sanctioned«.
Finally, SAP has also confirmed that it will continue to offer support to the victims of the conflict. So far it has raised some 3.7 million euros to support refugees in the area, and has offered free software to humanitarian organizations, in addition to enabling its partners to act to provide humanitarian aid to Ukraine, a measure in which they are participating. currently about 2,500 companies.
