1998 was the year Google was founded, Windows 98 launched, Apple introduced iMac, the FDA approved Viagra, Bill Clinton was impeached, an ice storm swept through Montreal, and Celine Dion enchanted romantics around the world with her #1 Billboard hit My Heart Will Go On. It is also the year SAP Canada opened its first office in Canada, choosing Montreal to establish its Canadian footprint.
Fast forward a quarter century and SAP Labs Canada is driving world-class innovation right here in Montreal alongside five other offices across Canada. This growth comes as a welcome result of years of continuous investment in our people, our customers, and our cutting-edge innovation. Quebec’s financial incentives for businesses make it a no-brainer for SAP to continue to invest in this city, this office, these people and our vision. For 25 years, SAP has made the strategic decision to grow our presence in this market. This has allowed us to define a unique culture for our people that emulates the diversity of this wonderful city.
Diversity
With its vibrant arts, music, and food scene, the city of Montreal provides an appealing quality of life. It is also an attractive city for doing business. Situated near peer cities like New York and Boston, this bilingual city boasts access to top talent through premier higher education institutions and a dynamic tech ecosystem.
This culturally rich community attracts people, businesses, and scholars from around the world who bring their diverse perspectives and backgrounds to the city’s fabric, which is a major value match with SAP. Diversity and inclusion have long been part of SAP’s DNA. As a recognized employer of choice, we pride ourselves on embracing and celebrating our differences.
As we grew our team, we evolved our office. Our current office has been held as a global standard for what the workplace of the future should represent. Purpose built for flexibility, inclusion and innovation, our office leverages data and employee feedback to ensure we are responding to what today’s workforce requires including a balance of collaborative workspaces, quiet areas, individual workplaces, creative areas, and personal areas such as a prayer room.
Innovation
Over 25 years, we’ve fortified our original investment by focusing on what it means to meet the needs of our customers in development, support, and delivery. SAP Labs Montreal’s innovation focus has grown over the past two decades. Our Montreal team, which is currently 61 percent developers, has long been established as a hub for commerce and retail. Today we see an end-to-end story, with teams innovating in spaces like Customer Experience (CX), cloud support, and Integrated Business Planning (IBP) for Supply Chain, building for every touchpoint of a modern commerce environment for customers. Our largest teams in Montreal fall under CX and support, but our IBP team is growing quickly. They are focused on delivering a cloud-based solution that seamlessly integrates for critical business functions such as sales, operations, forecasting and inventory planning for customers.
SAP Labs Montreal embraces every aspect of what makes SAP great – brilliant innovators, customer success and service teams, and all the businesspeople in-between that help us turn our new ideas into real products. We see a true collaborative process in place for solving our customer’s most pressing business problems – from development to delivery.
Our People
At the core of our success and growth over the past 25 years is our people. We have grown to over 1,000 people locally. We create a culture in everything we do that celebrates collaboration, individual contributions, and excitement. We recognize everyone’s values and empower them to take part in those values that are most important to them whether it be sustainability, wellness, community partnerships, giving, etc. It’s not only what our people need to be productive and innovative, but to build the right amount of flexibility for their lives in and out of work. We see the value in taking care of our people and nurturing their growth and opportunities.
The Secret Sauce
It is not uncommon for a company to celebrate a 25th anniversary, but what is spectacular is how we continue to re-invest into this market and team to ensure we are always innovating and remain relevant and prominent 25 year later. It is easy for a business to get comfortable, but that isn’t life at SAP Labs Montreal. We are an employer of choice in Montreal and across Canada. We have grown to be a major global R&D facility, SAP’s second oldest. We will continue to explore the road less travelled and create a future that continues to redefine the future of digital business.
