Nuance Communications has appointed former SAP executive Robert Schwarz as managing director for Australia and New Zealand.

Based in Melbourne, Schwarz will be responsible for driving Nuance’s market share and operations in Australia and New Zealand, with a particular focus on intelligent speech language technologies.

“We’re at a time where the relationship between people and technology needs to be reassessed. The advent of social media is changing the way that people want to interact with business and government. As a result technology needs to be more human like, making it simple and secure for consumers to communicate with organisations every day,” said Robert Schwarz, managing director, Australia and New Zealand.

“I’m looking forward to establishing Nuance as the go-to intelligent customer experience provider in the market and continuing Nuance’s strong momentum in Australia and New Zealand.” 

Most recently, Schwarz was director of OEM and Managed Cloud-as-a-Service businesses for SAP Australia and New Zealand, where he was responsible for developing new routes to market for SAP software solutions. He also held various senior management positions at SAP, including general manager of the Southern region.

Prior to SAP, Robert was CEO at The Distillery Software, and managing director of Damovo Australia and Hong Kong. He has also held senior strategic and management roles at IBM, Business Objects and Oracle.