These are disruptive times: John Ruthven, SAP

MUMBAI, INDIA: When SAP India recently announced a unified strategy of delivering next-generation cloud solutions to enable customers better manage their critical assets and relationships, it stirred some reasonable curiosity and interest in the industry. This was a good chance to understand the new way things are stacking up so when we met John Ruthven, Senior Vice President, Cloud and Line of Business, SAP Asia Pacific Japan, we sort of overwhelmed him with a slew of doubts, what-ifs, why-that's and how-to's around a range of issues from software, hardware, Business ByDesign to leadership changes and portfolio boards. 

Some excerpts.

Does this new move into Cloud makes folks like Amazon your rivals or complimentary neighbors? Specially when experts point out about the dichotomy of low-margin business model vs. your high-margin models?

It is a tough question to answer. Could you have predicted ten years back about ‘who would be my rival today?' or such questions? These are disruptive times and business rules are constant area of study and change.

When you say margins, I think that it is more of a value proposition game. ERP has been given a different place in the industry for the competitiveness it generates and that sends the margin debate in a new direction.

Companies like Sales force have been here with an early-mover advantage and now waking up to multi-tenancy service gaps. How do you reckon that side of competition?

Traditional CRM is dead in a sense because the outcome that people are looking for today is around customer engagement. We are rolling out new CRM edge with traditional anchors in place. As organizations struggle to enrich their customer engagement, new models will accelerate.

HANA is clearly witnessing a big shift as it is projected to become a platform and not just an engine. It will keep evolving then?

It is a massively innovative product and we have seen aggressive adoption. CIOs would be aligning their strategies and models around it as we move on.

Many would jump the gun here to wonder ‘Why this Cloud re-invention now - is the timing correct?' and other similar versions. How do you take that bite of disillusionment? Also any peek on how Bjorn Goerke, your CIO has been internalizing all these innovations?

SAP is no doubt, very well-timed on this move now. I think that the time is right to make this shift. It is a very thoughtful and strategic decision. We have been rightly-timed whether it is internalizing or externalizing acquisitions like Success Factors, Ariba or other innovations. We have ensured good execution. We have our hands full with immediate opportunities and with a rich customer base to bring out cloud offerings as well as to evolve HANA, which is giving us tremendously fresh opportunities that we couldn't previously address

Does this herald new partnerships, models, market expansion? A word for our readers?

At the end of the day, we know that the Cloud world is moving fast, and very very fast. We are part of this momentum so we will do everything to leverage this pace. What is also interesting is to see what customers would be doing with Cloud and we are looking forward to a nice balance. As we grow our business here, customers in India can be an important part of the journey while they keep accelerating their growth prospects. We have interesting POCs that encourage commercial cloud adoption and we have policies that make it easier for them to absorb cloud.

When you announced the VMware - HANA handshake, there was a flurry of good questions on how software may have implications on hardware, specially with areas like performance hits or invisible increase in license costs? Your take.

While SaaS, PaaS and IaaS are interesting to watch, the most significant and radical portion would be growth in SaaS space. Hardware pricing has been going in the same way for years. HANA is disruptive because it introduces efficiency as a new platform. We see HANA becoming a compelling force that way. The cloud has profoundly changed the way people interact as I see it. In enterprises today, IT is required to scale up, provide real-time insights into business and help companies decide, respond boldly and quickly, so the idea is to bring even more options to help provide enterprises with remarkable business value, radical simplification of their IT landscapes and tremendous competitive advantages.