SAP AG (NYSE: SAP) today announced the opening of its new SAP Global Support Center (GSC) in Dalian, expanding the reach of SAP's worldwide support network.

The GSC China will become the primary hub for delivering services and support to SAP customers in Asia Pacific countries including China, Japan and Korea. More than 4,200 SAP customers throughout the Asia Pacific region are expected to from the workforce, which provides support in the customers' native language. The GSC China will also serve SAP customers worldwide as part of SAP's 24/7 service and support network, SAP Active Global Support.

The new support center in Dalian will be staffed initially with more than 130 native speakers of Chinese, Japanese, Korean and English. At an investment of around EUR 10 million, the facility has been built with capacity for workforce expansion as the number of serviced customers increases. The multinational support team, comprised of existing SAP employees and new hires, will provide proactive services and support such as online monitoring, problem resolution, remote maintenance and knowledge transfer throughout the software life cycle–including planning, implementation, operations, upgrades and ongoing maintenance–to help ensure the optimum performance of SAP solutions.

SAP chose to set up its new support center in Dalian due to a number of factors, including the city's infrastructure, competitive costs and an international environment that will make it easier to recruit employees fluent in Japanese or Korean. Dalian is also home to a number of educational institutions as well as the Dalian Software Park, created with the help of government initiatives to establish the city as an IT and logistics hub.