India is top priority: SAP CEO

BANGALORE: That India is one of the countries on the forefront of SAP’s activities in the Asia Pacific region was clear and loud from SAP CEO Henning Kagermann message at a press briefing today. No wonder then, while the company is looking forward to double its workforce in India in the next few years, it is also investing 20 million Euros for developing a world-class campus at Whitefields, Bangalore.



"It’s not only about development. A company has to constantly think of strategically locating its various resources and functions to derive optimum performance out of them and India figures big on those considerations," said Kagermann who is visiting the country for the first time. He also said that India was a key market in Asia for SAP with huge opportunities for future growth and the company expects to double its workforce across various segments in the country over the next few years. Besides, he also stressed that the company’s strategy for the SMB segment had paid off well in the country.


"India is a huge source of knowledge and highly skilled people–the reason why we are in the process of developing our second largest development community outside Germany," he said. According to him, India could also become a consulting and customer development hub for Asia. "We presently have around 100 people in the consulting firm and with a possible increase the country could extend its services across the world," Kagermann said. He added that while India was a good candidate for SAP’s internal shared services initiative, the customers in the country too had proven to be as ambitious as any in developed countries.


Kagermann also spoke in brief about the software industry, the future of ERP and the company’s efforts to work with that future. "Software functionality in the future will be considered as a service. Once people start perceiving it as a service, it would become clear that a company can immediately replace one service with another," he said adding that, "The economy as we see it now will remain uncertain at least for some time in future. In such times, it is better for companies to prepare themselves for any eventuality. They can do this by changing their operational landscape to include more adaptability, make decisions more real time and increase their flexibility to match market or customer demands."


He also spoke on enterprise services architecture as the roadmap for the future to bring down cost of operations while increasing flexibility and adaptability, cautioning that it would take years to build such architecture. According to him, the company would launch the ‘next wave of ERP solutions’–a new generation of applications that would lower operational cost while increasing user experience–early next year.


Speaking on the Business Intelligence unit in India, SAP Labs India Joint Managing Director Clas Neumann said, "We are looking forward to increase our strength from 40 to 86 by the end of this year. Like all our starting ventures, we will begin by supporting existing development projects before taking over command of some."


Replying to a question on SAP’s strategy post the possible merger of two of its competitors, Kagermann said that the company brushed aside any possibility of change in strategy. "We don’t need to change our strategy. Perhaps our competitors might have to do that because they are the ones losing ground. Even together they account for only half of our market share. We don’t see any need to change our landscape drastically," he stressed.


(Cyber News Service)