A not-so-bad rush to North-east

DELHI, INDIA: If you are in a village, no problem. If you are specially-abled, no problem. If you speak and write only in Hindi, no problem. No Problem seems to be the pet word for this German Enterprise software major, when it comes to India and its unique needs.

A message that hits you right at the moment when you see top executives like Adaire Fox-Martin walking in the press meet draped appositely in a saree.

At the SAP Forum this week, she and other seniors took a proud moment to announce some progress on some Hindustani efforts. The first among these was a roll-out of a Cloud-based system to Shillong, after having attempted a village administration system pilot with a Rajasthan Panchayat. Having traversed the unique hinterland of land records, project tracking etc with 3G, GPRS and in some cases EDGE; SAP India Pvt Ltd is collaborating with IIM Shillong to recreate the concept, albeit in a tribal body model. The absence of any data capturing system whatsoever makes it quite a challenge and that's how it would be a real testing ground for a sustainable system that can go beyond limitations of training a village headman iteratively. SAP executives are hopeful about this effort.

Just like the next major announcement that validated the hopes for a Hindi ERP that the company showed a few months back. It has launched the General Availability. "We have taken cognizance of the fact that 48 per cent of India is still about Hindi and a lot of transactions happening in this language." Mathew Thomas VP - Strategic Industries, SAP India Pvt Ltd said.

This ERP sibling takes care of not only the front-end part of language challenge but also the back end one with 4.5 million lines of code redone. The users can see, transact and report between Hindi and English environments smoothly now as he explained.

Commenting on customer part of this new offering like issues of upgrades, DIY tweaking etc, he reasoned that as long as SAP standards are taken care of, no problems would surface. Also this ECC would be an enhancement package for existing SAP users. In future, other regional languages could be on the radar too, after this move which SAP claims is unique when it comes to ERP vendors offering special versions for Indian market.

While many Hindi-inclined Indians can have the option of viewing a language of their choice and comfort, soon the visually-challenged too would be able to work on its software, as part of SAP's accessibility mission. It is working with Xavier Centre of Visually Challenged with a testing team for the same. Besides these steps, SAP launched its 'Urban Matters' initiative in India for municipalities. The action for SAP, as Peter Gartenberg, India MD said, is in India, with a lot of innovation being done and explored for exporting abroad from its second largest R&D centre here.