BANGALORE, INDIA: Luis Murguia, senior vice president, small and midsize enterprises, SAP EMEA in interview with Shilpa Shanbhag of Dataquest, talks about SME market and its opportunities in India.

What are the opportunities in the SME market?

SME are witnessing a lot of competition and they are trying to put their best foot forward to keep pace with the recent trends. These companies are no longer the small companies; but with the aid of the best practices followed around the world, they have become an emerging sector. There are about 85,000 SMEs, which itself reflects the sea of opportunity that this segment offers.

What are your plans for India?

For its functioning, SAP depends on multi channel partners. In other words, it can be said that we are heavily dependent on these partners to add value to our business model and it is these partners who add the local industry flavor to our existence. Our plans for the future are to increase our footprint in India and also cater to Indias specific requirements. Like for example, in an industry that has a turnover of less than Rs. 5 crore, SaaS which is a subscription based model takes away the need for a separate IT department in a small organization. Building new solutions alone is not enough to sell products and get benefit out of it.

Which are the market trends that you would like to focus on?

In the future, we would like to concentrate on sectors like automobile, textile, and consumer products, and companies offering professional services. Above all, we expect that the trends that were witnessed in Q4 would continue in 2010 as well.

Even during tough times, how has SAP managed to stay ahead in the race?

First, during the financial crisis there was a lot of rethinking of business strategies witnessed to refocus on the core areas and reduce operational costs as well. SAP has formed an effective platform to cater to end-to-end processes. SAPs offer of premier solutions not only increased business, but also enhanced our graphical interface. The prime reason for this being that the solutions are user friendly and using SAP solutions is as easy as using Facebook. Second, our solutions have enabled users to make quick and effective business decisions, thus, enabling users to take real-time decisions and in turn improved the intelligence of the products. Software accessories have gained importance in the environment of cloud computing and taking this trend into consideration, SAP has been able to be a part of major projects of enterprises and helped them deliver better to their customers.