SAP is launching a landmark entrepreneurship program to support Indian start-ups, along with investments in education and healthcare, in the wake of SAP SE CEO Bill McDermott’s recent visit to India.
SAP’s partnership with the Indian Institute of Technology (IIT) – Bombay on the Entrepreneurship Development Initiative will help to pre-incubate and incubate early stage entrepreneurial technology-based ventures as well as to create important infrastructure support systems.
“We want to make sure that we impact 1 billion lives in India. We see that HANA is the database platform for the 21st century. We want to give young start-ups access to HANA; we want to make it easy for them to make their innovations on top of HANA and with SAP and we want to make it extremely simple and affordable for them to do that,” McDermott said.
McDermott promised support for small and medium companies as well as large enterprises. “What I see on the small side of the equation is to provide small and medium enterprises and young start-ups the access to SAP innovation in the cloud, which is an easy way to consume affordable cloud solution.”
SAP has also committed to upskill 2000 teachers in science, technology, engineering and information and communication technologies as part of the Train 10,000 Teachers initiative and has partnered with a program to enhance teaching skills in core engineering and science subjects at engineering colleges.
McDermott promised continued investment from SAP in India: “I think you will see a 10-15 per cent increase in hiring on a per annum basis for the next several years. Of course, if our ambitions play out the way I dream they would, that will just accelerate.”
In addition to start-up and education support, McDermott spoke of major plans in the healthcare sector. “We are going to announce a healthcare division. We are partnering with all the best universities in the world to see how we can use HANA in their programs and do the early research against this villain called cancer.”
Citing the transferability of one solution to another, McDermott said, “What’s interesting about healthcare is that it behaves a lot like smart meters for the home and like smart cities.” He said that it capitalises on the Internet of Things “so we feel like we have a fast start and in some ways an unfair advantage.”
