SAP cloud solutions and services offer a market-leading cloud platform, flexible on-demand infrastructure, and proven enterprise cloud security and hosting that are available in public, private, and hybrid cloud environment.
SAP Cloud Solutions are forecasted to drive 50 percent of the company’s revenue over the next two to three years, not only in India but globally. Subramanian Ananthapadmanabhan, Vice-President, Digital Core of SAP India said that the revenue is anticipated, especially now that its older customers shift to the cloud.
SAP’s global cloud revenue grew by 40{aa282f308afcc222aaa21b0478c79e01a8fedd01972e2180867097bd93930f22}, to touch 1.69 billion euros as reported in its recent quarterly results.
In an interview by ETtech.com, Ananthapadmanabhan said:
“Most of them started on-premise and are now moving to cloud-based offerings, so there’s a huge opportunity in this market.”
He said that there is a double-digit growth for SAP’s cloud business in India. Such performance does not come as a surprise knowing that in the last five years, the overall market for cloud solutions in the country has grown by 300{aa282f308afcc222aaa21b0478c79e01a8fedd01972e2180867097bd93930f22}.
“The big change we see in the last few years is that no one is asking for only on-premise solutions anymore. In the last three years, we’ve seen customers come back saying that they don’t want only infrastructure or platform as a service, but a combined software as a service offering. We’re seeing a shift to a hybrid model where companies will have data in public and private clouds, as well as on-premise data,” he added.
According to Nutanix, a cloud computing software company, the adoption of hybrid cloud workloads in India will more than triple to 43{aa282f308afcc222aaa21b0478c79e01a8fedd01972e2180867097bd93930f22} from 13{aa282f308afcc222aaa21b0478c79e01a8fedd01972e2180867097bd93930f22} in the next two years. If the projection is realized, the country will be the global leader in hybrid cloud usage and adoption.
SAP has 10,200 customers in India across the enterprise, SME and new-age company segments, with the SME segment comprising almost 80{aa282f308afcc222aaa21b0478c79e01a8fedd01972e2180867097bd93930f22}. The country is one of the fastest-growing markets for SAP and recently ranked #1 “Best Companies to Work For by Great Places to Work Survey 2018 and 2019”.
The VP shared that the cloud remains SAP’s focus for 2019-2020. He said:
“There are two aspects to this. Customers are transforming themselves digitally and moving to an intelligent enterprise. The focus is on moving this intelligent enterprise to a cloud.”
The market has matured and has moved on from previous concerns around data privacy and residency. According to Ananthapadmanabhan, aside from leveraging cloud in digital transformation, organisations are now open to considering cloud solutions’ application in newer areas.
According to Gartner, the public cloud services revenue in India is likely to reach $2.4 billion in 2019, a 24.3{aa282f308afcc222aaa21b0478c79e01a8fedd01972e2180867097bd93930f22} growth over last year. India is the third fastest-growing market globally despite a global revenue share of just over 1{aa282f308afcc222aaa21b0478c79e01a8fedd01972e2180867097bd93930f22}.
Sid Nag, Research Vice President at Gartner stated:
“The shift from ‘cloud-first’ to a ‘cloud-only’ model in India is pushing organizations to increase spending on public cloud services to advance their digital business initiatives.”