Pioneering Digital Transformation: Insights from Marwan Zeineddine at SAP UAE
In a rapidly evolving digital landscape, Marwan Zeineddine, Managing Director of SAP UAE, is at the forefront of empowering organisations to embrace innovative technologies. With a strong focus on cloud solutions, AI integration, and sustainability, Marwan leads SAP’s commitment to driving digital transformation across the region. In this interview, he shares his insights on the challenges businesses face in their digital journeys and the strategic initiatives SAP is implementing to support their growth and success.
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Career Journey: Can you share your career journey and what led you to your current role as Managing Director at SAP UAE?
I have deliberately followed a diverse career path, as I am passionate about all aspects of technology, from a technical standpoint to exploring how it can be leveraged to improve people’s lives.
After graduating from the American University of Beirut with a BSc in Computer Science, I spent several years designing and developing customised apps and then complex software, mainly in the areas of enterprise resource planning (ERP) and human capital management. After this, I moved into project management, outsourcing services, implementation, consultancy, and sales, all of which helped prepare me for a series of leadership roles.
I have been with SAP for around nine years in total and have just completed a year in my role as Managing Director of SAP UAE. I couldn’t have chosen a more opportune time to take on this role, with AI creating major industry shifts and the UAE being at the forefront of new technologies.
Digital Transformation: SAP is at the forefront of digital transformation. How is SAP helping organisations in the UAE adopt innovative technologies to remain competitive?
Many of our UAE customers understand the importance of digital transformation to gain a competitive edge, future-proof their operations, and leverage the latest technologies. They recognise that the cloud is the best platform to enable scalability, data availability, measurability, and access to SAP’s reliable, relevant, and responsible Business AI.
Nevertheless, some customers are unsure where or how to start their digital transformation journey, so our aim is to make the process as accessible as possible for all companies. SAP and our partner ecosystem are there to support our customers through every step of the journey and simplify it wherever possible.
Over the past few years, we have introduced two service-as-a-subscription offerings—RISE with SAP and GROW with SAP—to help simplify and accelerate cloud transitions for customers of all sizes and starting points.
An important consequence of digital transformation is its impact on job roles, which are changing much faster than ever before, particularly with the proliferation of AI applications. This is why SAP is supporting public and private sector enterprises in this area, investing significantly in training initiatives. Our Young Professionals Program (YPP), for example, is focused on identifying gifted Emirati graduates and training them in advanced technological skills to support a sustainable workforce and produce future technology leaders. Similarly, our Dual Study Program (DSP) is offered in collaboration with many UAE universities to students alongside their regular curriculum. The DSP is a sponsored training initiative provided by SAP’s Digital Skills Center and fast-tracks students’ work readiness, closing the gap between academic studies and industry requirements.
Cloud Solutions: How have SAP’s cloud offerings influenced business operations in the UAE, and what future developments do you foresee in the region’s cloud adoption?
SAP cloud solutions, particularly our SAP S/4HANA ERP, are changing the way our UAE and regional customers operate in myriad ways. These companies enjoy increased efficiencies, greater visibility over operations, and integrated and automated processes. They also have the scalability and flexibility needed to respond to changes in demand and seize opportunities in the market with agility.
Arguably, the most significant impact of SAP digital transformations stems from their ability to drive innovation and produce high-quality data and insights. Effective data is not only important for decision-making; it is also fundamental to ensuring the effectiveness of AI solutions—after all, AI is only as good as the data made available to it.
As for the future outlook, our region is focused on digital transformation to support economic diversification, so digital transformation will continue its impressive pace. In the UAE, the government strongly supports digital transformation across all sectors while also leading by example with its innovative approach and UAE Digital Government Strategy 2025, becoming the first country in the world to appoint a Minister of AI. Within this supportive framework, the UAE is set to remain at the forefront of a rapidly evolving digital landscape.
Sustainability Initiatives: How is SAP incorporating sustainability into its solutions, and what role does it play in helping UAE businesses meet their sustainability goals?
It is no coincidence that 97 of the 100 greenest companies in the world run SAP. Sustainability is core to SAP’s corporate strategy and our purpose: to help the world run better and improve people’s lives. Our vision is for carbon accounting to match financial accounting, eventually adding a green line to a company’s top and bottom lines.
In the UAE, as elsewhere, we aim to create a positive economic, social, and environmental impact while respecting planetary boundaries and human rights—both as an exemplar through our own activities and as an enabler to customers using our products and services.
When you consider that 99 of the 100 largest companies in the world are SAP customers, 85 of the 100 largest companies are SAP S/4HANA customers, and around 80% of SAP’s customers are SMEs, you can see the enormous impact we can have on addressing climate change. This is why SAP is embedding sustainability directly into ERP systems, ensuring that integration drives profitable, sustainable businesses, creating real-world benefits.
In addition to cloud-driven sustainability innovations and evolving AI-powered use cases, we offer our UAE customers a comprehensive portfolio of sustainability solutions and services to help them drive sustainable practices inside their organisations and across their value chains. These tools enable them to be agile and responsive, maintain control of integration and data flows, and master the complexity of sustainability challenges.
We also collaborate with like-minded partners in the UAE. For example, SAP worked with MORO Digital Hub to make the SAP Public Cloud offering and SAP Business AI available on the world’s largest solar-powered data centre, based in Dubai, which appeals to many of our customers.
Industry-Specific Solutions: SAP serves diverse industries. Can you elaborate on how SAP tailors its solutions to meet the specific needs of key sectors in the UAE, such as oil and gas or finance?
SAP has over 50 years of experience across 25 industries, with proven solutions for industry-specific needs and goals. The process is similar, regardless of the industry we are approaching. SAP and our partners rely on our global expertise and knowledge of best practices and requirements specific to their industries to build holistic solutions encompassing various industry-specific modules or co-innovations.
In the oil, gas, and energy sector, we are helping companies meet the world’s energy needs securely, affordably, and sustainably. A great example of this in the UAE can be found in our customer Crescent Petroleum, the largest privately held upstream oil and gas company in the Middle East. The company recently successfully deployed SAP’s oil and gas industry-specific solutions for its operations in the second phase of a digital transformation project. The first phase represented the first global implementation of the SAP S/4HANA Oil & Gas Model Company 1809 at that time, supporting plant maintenance, procurement, project systems, finance, human resources functions, and HSE functions.
The second phase included the integration of industry-specific modules into S/4HANA to boost data quality, productivity, operational efficiencies, cost control, and sustainability reporting. SAP worked closely with Crescent Petroleum’s digital transformation team to develop specific solutions that address company-specific use cases. One example is the custom trucking operations solution using the MII module of SAP, integrated with SAP’s invoicing engine. This involved integration with plant systems, loading dock systems, and SAP S/4HANA modules in a single process chain, bringing disparate processes into one seamless workflow with appropriate handshakes.
AI and Machine Learning: How is SAP leveraging AI and machine learning to drive efficiencies and innovation within the businesses you serve in the UAE?
SAP embeds innovative technologies such as artificial intelligence and machine learning throughout the value chain. As a result, our customers can better serve their clients, build resilient supply chains, introduce new business models, and optimise existing business processes.
Several aspects differentiate SAP’s approach to AI from that of our competitors. First, there is the quality of data, which is the foundation of effective AI, and no one has better, deeper, or more comprehensive business data than SAP. We also prioritise customer data privacy—it’s built in. Second, SAP Business AI works out of the box; it’s fully integrated, benchmarked, compliant, and ready to use. Third, we give customers and partners full choice over which leading generative AI model they want to use for their extensions, including models from OpenAI, Google, and the best open-source alternatives. Fourth, Joule, our generative AI copilot, is being embedded throughout our enterprise cloud portfolio to deliver proactive and contextualised insights. Joule is not only changing the way people work with SAP solutions—it is transforming the way people work overall.
We also collaborate widely to bring the best solutions to our customers. At our annual Sapphire flagship conference earlier this year, we unveiled generative AI innovations and partnerships, including Google Cloud, Amazon Web Services (AWS), Meta, Microsoft, Mistral AI, and NVIDIA, showcasing how the company is taking business to the next level in the era of AI.
Customer Experience: How does SAP ensure customer satisfaction and help businesses in the UAE enhance their own customer experiences?
Customer success is at the centre of everything SAP does. Our services and support offerings help customers build their teams’ skills and deploy their SAP solutions. They are designed to enable continual innovation—delivering the speed, flexibility, and results customers need right from the start and for years to come.
It is very important for us to give our customers choice. As every company faces unique challenges and is at a different stage on its path to the cloud, our customers can choose how we work together. The organisation’s individual goals, timelines, and plans define how deep our engagement goes. Extensive support services, guided tools, and resources are included with every SAP cloud solution to ensure success. Our customers can also move faster, tackle bigger challenges, or free their teams to do other work by simply adding incremental service and support options.
On the other side of the coin, SAP continuously evolves our customer experience (CX) portfolio so organisations can empower their teams to deliver exceptional experiences for their own customers. SAP’s differentiating quality is its ability to seamlessly connect customer (front-end) data with operational (back-end) data across an organisation, empowering intelligent decision-making and automation across the value chain to better serve customer needs.
To mention a few of our CX solutions as examples, SAP Commerce Cloud drives profitable growth with connected, insightful, and adaptable commerce; SAP Emarsys Customer Engagement is purpose-built for marketers to deliver personalised, omnichannel experiences with a privacy-first mindset; and SAP Sales Cloud leverages an intelligent, cloud-native architecture and generative and traditional AI to enable dynamic sales journeys that can be seamlessly connected with back-office processes to maximise revenue generation and improve the buying experience.
Cybersecurity: With the increasing threat of cyberattacks, how does SAP ensure the security of its solutions and data for its UAE customers?
Cyber threats globally are growing in sophistication and intensity with every passing day. Naturally, cybersecurity remains a top priority for SAP. Our security, cloud compliance, and data protection measures are designed to help keep SAP and our customers’ data safe, process it in compliance with local legislation, and protect it from malicious use.
SAP follows a holistic approach to security that is based on three pillars: First, we build secure-by-design solutions; second, we run cloud operations securely; and third, we create a security-first culture in everything we do. This includes training our employees and partnering with our customers and our extensive ecosystem to address security needs and improve overall security.
Challenges in Digital Transformation: What are the key challenges businesses in the UAE face in their digital transformation journeys, and how is SAP addressing these challenges?
As I mentioned, digital transformation in the UAE, and in fact, our entire region, has been extremely impressive. Nevertheless, there are some challenges, including companies needing to transition to the cloud quickly but not knowing where to start, as well as issues such as cybersecurity threats and data sovereignty.
I have already touched on these earlier, but in short, SAP helps to demystify and simplify the cloud transition process for our customers through our services-as-a-subscription offerings, RISE with SAP and GROW with SAP. We design solutions and run cloud operations securely, while issues such as data sovereignty are being addressed by companies such as SAP establishing more data centres in the region, allowing data to be stored within the country.
Future Vision for SAP UAE: What are your future plans for SAP in the UAE, and how do you envision the company’s role in the region’s digital economy evolving?
The future global economies are cloud-based, AI-enabled, secure, and sustainable, which is where we at SAP UAE will continue to focus our efforts.
The UAE is a highly significant market for SAP, and we will continue to support the country’s impressive digital agenda. This means assisting public and private sector organisations in their digital transformation and enabling them to operate as a network of intelligent enterprises. We will also deliver innovative technologies that enhance companies’ financial and sustainability goals while empowering the local workforce through transformational training programs.
Most importantly, we are extremely grateful to operate in this country, where the UAE leadership plays a proactive role in encouraging and supporting innovation for all stakeholders, creating an environment where technological advances can flourish to benefit everyone.
