BANGALORE, INDIA: In the current economic volatility, enterprises and businesses face the tough challenge of sustainability and growth.

According to SAP's senior vice president – Business User and Platform for Asia Pacific Japan, Simon Dale, businesses are networks and to achieve sustainability and growth, enterprises need to be dynamic in their strategy and approach; and part of this network dynamism is acquisition that maintains balance in the business ecosystem.

SAP has been closely following this strategy. In fact, the company's acquisition of Business Object, the business intelligence solution provider in 2008, has added a new dimension to SAP's business portfolio.

For sustainability and growth, Dale points that enterprises and organizations need to focus on developing two business attributes – clarity for business strategies and streamlining operations and transparency for accountability that helps to protect company's brand and reputation.

SAP vision

“Transparent and accountable, lean and agile, customer centric and collaborative – are the key pillars of SAP's vision. Focusing on transparency, accountability and following regulations and auditing benefit business, while lean and agile means following best practices that frees resources that can be deployed in other areas of business,” Dale says.

SAP has been investing in protecting customers' investments to offer higher values to customers, which is helping build a strong solid business case, he adds.

“Internally, SAP has the value university for professionals that teaches values and also has the value academy for customers, which helps understand the values of solutions and services. Basically, it's for customers and making them understand business value of IT,” he explains.

SAP invests substantially in research and development (R&D) and innovations. Here, Dale stresses that protecting customers is very important to SAP and the company has been making long term investments in protecting customers through R&D and innovations.

“Investments in R&D and innovation helps to improve products and solutions along with providing better support services to customers that adds more values to products and services. By offering proactive service support over phones and websites along with premium services allows the customers to focus more on their businesses rather than getting worried about maintaining IT infrastructure and networks,” Dale comments.

SAP on green IT and cloud computing

Company has set carbon reduction target of 2000 level by 2020, which is part of Green IT initiative and also social engagement and responsibility, along SAP's business sustainability strategy. SAP is extensively using virtualization technology to consolidate servers and also reduce the power consumption that leads to heat and carbon emission in the environment.

About cloud computing, Dale points that it's still a marketing definition and presently there's no solid definition for the concept. Also, cloud computing is not limited to just software services which has an end-point.

“We see SAP as a player in cloud computing by delivering on-demand solutions directly and working with our variety of ecosystem of partners to develop & deliver other services in this space. We are in the council of cloud computing defining new standards and global acceptable proposition,” he observes.

SAP on-demand or cloud computing includes ERP and CRM on-demand, E-sourcing on demand, BI on-demand and Business ByDesign – hosted ERP solution.

“We are partnering with OEM suppliers and vendors to offer our on-demand or cloud services. Cloud computing is like convergence as there's the Internet, bandwidths and software application. And on the back end, there's virtualization and network infrastructure to reduce costs in various areas,” Dale explains.

“Moreover,” he concludes, “in coming years cloud computing will lead to great cost effective means for businesses and people.”