SAP India, as one of the key players in SAP APJ, has witnessed an unprecedented growth of over 100{aa282f308afcc222aaa21b0478c79e01a8fedd01972e2180867097bd93930f22} both in terms of license revenue and customer acquisition.
SAP APJ President Scott Russell stated that India continues to be one of the fastest-growing markets for SAP, wherein Research and Development centres will receive further investments.
Here are the excerpts from The Hindu’s conversation with Deb Deep Sengupta, Managing Director of SAP India on the country’s Cloud growth, working with competitors and hyperscalers, IoT, Smart Cities, and future plans.
Tandem Growth
According to Sengupta, SAP Asia Pacific and Japan (APJ) is growing together with India with its performance attributed mostly to the SAP in Cloud.
SAP APJ is on its 22nd consecutive quarter of growth, a commendable feat in a volatile and dynamic market in the APAC. The Managing Director expressed that the region continues to be the fastest-growing in the world for SAP in Cloud.
“I think that’s reflective of markets looking to consume and use technology in its simplest,” he said.
This translates to the point that markets are utilizing technology in its simplest yet purposeful design without the complexity of reordering their infrastructure. Also, he affirmed that the region has a large SME market that quickly adopted the Cloud. This contributed to the technology’s growth performance aside from the expected influence of established conglomerates in APAC. Leveraging the Cloud, SMEs are anticipated to manage growth in terms of new customer acquisition.
As a country, Sengupta said that India continues to be one of the fastest-growing and strongest businesses for SAP both globally and regionally. The country has shown laudable financial performance and progressive ways of utilizing technologies such as machine learning, AI, blockchain, and robotics. The trends on how the Indian customers leverage these technologies will positively drive change.
The Shape of Cloud
With regards to the massive growth of Cloud in India, he clarified that the growth is not because of spillage from saturated markets. The SAP India head confidently said that the Cloud is far from reaching its saturation point with mature and new markets steadfastly growing. Specifically, in India, the trend is on consumption-based technology wherein businesses need not own and run the asset. Instead, the objective is for businesses to consume and use it efficiently to get the maximum value out of it.
Partner/ Competitors
Sengupta emphasized that in an era where technology is constantly evolving, SAP’s strength stands out in solving complex business problems. The software and cloud giant builds, creates, designs, and delivers eloquent, simple, easy-to-use business solutions. Customers are given the liberty to choose from using these applications either on-premise or in the Cloud.
He considers their “competitors” such as Microsoft, GCP, and AWS as “partners” in terms of them helping businesses consume SAP’s technology. Sengupta cited the example of a company who wants to buy and consume, be it for fort he digital core of their business, supply chain, or financial management.
“They have the choice of whether to run on SAP Cloud or they would run on one of those hyperscalers. Either way, they are still leveraging SAP’s best-in-class applications. So, I don’t really see them as competition. It is more about giving our customers a choice,” he explained.
Partnering with these hyperscalers necessitates that the SAP applications will run natively on their infrastructure that is resident locally in markets such as India. This enables the company to address the constantly changing regulatory landscape around data sovereignty, data privacy, data privatization.
Emerging Technology in India
The Managing Director explained that typical use cases the company has got across the region are for solving predictive maintenance scenarios. Being able to predict downtime of a high performing asset in a factory with the use of IoT saves huge operational costs.
In India, Sengupta also identified the robust sector of agriculture as one of those industries who will gain from IoT. IoT can sensor information for moisture content, the ingredient in the soil, and conduct targeted fertilization across a field. He emphasized that SAP is using IoT in different business scenarios to be able to enhance upon the process, where IoT is not just used for the collection of the data but more importantly, for the data’s integration back within the process.
On Smart Cities and Digital India
Sengupta shared:
“If I step back, two or three things happened during this period… We all know that India has become the number one consumer of mobile Internet in the world. It may be due to policy, a company or due to just the market.”
SAP has seen significant growth in a few areas like smart utilities. He cited two events that boosted SAP’s business in the country through the government programmes Smart Cities and Digital India.
He specified that the first phase of APDRP (Accelerated Power Development and Reform Programme) followed by the second initiative of putting smart meters resulted in a significant amount of growth in digital business in the country.
To him, the automation of the entire public infrastructure had a greater impact on SAP’s numbers, not just the Smart Cities. At the moment, the company is doing automation for all the ports for Indian Ports Association through their partner Tech Mahindra and also the post offices which TCS. Sengupta said that Post offices are the next largest project in the world as it goes into banking and insurance.
With the investments in infrastructure, both by public and private participation, SAP has seen a significant amount of adoption of modern technology.
What Lies Ahead
As one of the fastest and strongest markets for SAP, India will continue to be the company’s primary investment markets as software and cloud company continue to build its capability globally as stated by Sengupta. The company will continue to invest in its large R&D centres around the country. And as a domestic market, he has this to say:
“I haven’t got the GDP numbers but across Asia, it’s one of the key anchors as to why we grow faster than the global average on GDP… It is a strategic market in terms of the growth market”
