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Business software provider SAP has announced a $one billion investment in India over the next five years to enhance its Indian operations. SAP currently has around 1050 customers in India and has outlined its goal of reaching 15,000 customers by 2010 in India.
In an interview with Pragati Simlote of CyberMedia News Hans-Peter Klaey, president and CEO of SAP Asia Pacific and corporate office of SAP Group outlines SAP’s focus on the SMEs for growth as well as India’s contribution to the company’s growing APAC operations.
Q. How is India’s performance vis-à-vis other APAC countries?
A. India belongs to SAP’s top four markets in APAC including Japan, Australia and China. It is leading in many ways. In 2005, SAP APAC made 1,500 new customers and in H1 2006, we already have 800 new customers and India is on the leading front. Twenty five per cent of these new customers are coming out from India and many of them are from the mid tier. SAP India has already signed on 200 new customer partnerships in 2006 – thereby already crossing the total number of client wins in India in 2005.
Today SAP has over 1,050 Indian customers ranging across industry segments like consumer products, retail, BFSI, textiles and government
 Q. Is SAP still betting on the SME sector for growth?
A. We see a great momentum in the SME sector, as the adoption of SAP best practices is very strong here. We also have excellent partners who play in this segment. Currently, in India we have around 1050 customers out of which 575 are SMEs. SMEs also account for more than 30 per cent of SAP’s India revenues. We have announced our target of growing from 35,000 to 1,00,000 customers globally by 2010 and we expect that majority of them would come from the SME sector. The same is true for India.
Q. What role does your India partners play in the company’s growth?
A. Our Indian partners are developing deep verticalized industry solutions. We have 28 industry solutions in the market. Our partners working in collaboration with us are micro verticalizing these industry solutions. So say we have the industry solution for hi-tech, in which there are suppliers for electronic components. Our partners then take our hi-tech solution and reconfigures it further down to suite that micro vertical need.
Q. How would the Gurgaon presence benefit SAP?
A. Our Gurgaon office would add significantly to SAP’s lines of businesses, housing Global Services and Support Center (GSC) as well as SAP India Field and SAP Global Delivery Center.
It would also house new center of excellences (CoEs) around key focus areas.
From our perspective India is the market where we need to be close to the customers. So we have our major office and also have satellite offices across India to be close to our customers and partners and make sure that we are developing.
Q. What are SAP’s plans of penetrating further down in India?
A. We have announced the satellite office concept under which we would have additional six offices at least in the next few months in India. We would open up small offices to register our direct presence in these cities. Right now we have partner presence in many cities. For SAP itself we have offices in 10 cities – big offices in Gurgaon, Delhi, Kolkata, Mumbai and Bangalore. We also have offices in Chennai, Ahmedabad, and Hyderabad and are just about finalizing an office in Ludhiana.
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