Tom Kindermans, Senior Vice President of SAP APJ, discusses with KTP Radhika the company’s innovation strategies and the technological characteristics of Indian businesses
What are your strategies for HANA in India? How has its adoption been?
HANA is our fastest growing product in the history of SAP both from a pipeline and revenue point of view. Last year, we did nearly €400 million worldwide with HANA. This year, we want to double or triple this. India is an early adopter of HANA and it is also the fastest growing product in the country. It was available mainly in the analytics space, but now we have launched the business suite on HANA and have replaced the underlying database within a memory appliance.
What are SAP’s strategies for continuous improvement?
Innovation is our motto for continuous improvement. Whenever we see an opportunity to innovate, we make sure that within two months we will have something on that front for our customers. This has made our delivery cycles much shorter than in the past. In comparison, our competitors really work with upgrades. With the upgrade methods you have certain versions and you need to follow the new versions. Every year or two, the customer will get a new version and if they miss it, they will be in trouble. Customers are forced to follow all these upgrades which usually are very cumbersome and expensive processes.
SAP stopped this process two years ago. We now work with enhancement packs, which have lots of innovations incorporated in it. They are not obliged to follow each enhancement pack. A customer company can decide whether they should go for these enhancement packs or not. You only implement enhancement packs if you believe that it is relevant, otherwise you can let it go. Implementation of enhancement packs is non-disruptive. And these are seamlessly easy to implement. You do not have to go through a very expensive upgrade process where your system goes down for several days.
SAP is the enterprise business applications market leader in India. What are the peculiarities of this market?
India is an emerging market as well as an early adopter market in terms of technology. It is a very technology savvy market. Compared to other countries such as China, companies in India are very curious about technology, adopt innovations aggressively and view technology as a major differentiation for competition. However, the challenge is that India has a lot of rural population. Reaching to this huge rural market is a challenge and at the same time, a big opportunity. Technology can make rural life better. And we can facilitate it. In India, ERP penetration is still low. There are a lot of companies that are still running on the manual system or own developed system or on a non-integrated system. We still see a big market for our traditional ERP solutions in India.
SAP has always been focusing on the SME sector. How does this market in India differ from other parts of the world?
SAP defines SMEs as companies with $300 million revenue and below. SME organizations in India are probably one of the most successful ones in the world and form a big part of Indian economy. SAP has a very strong SME presence. One of the reasons that we are very successful in the SME market is that we have a very strong ecosystem for SMEs and have very strong partners to address its needs. First, we address them through partners and if partners are not available in a particular area, we do business directly. In the SME sector, we follow 25 industries. We have sub-verticals and micro- verticals in each sector and we have solutions which address very specific needs of a micro-vertical. At the same time, growth opportunity will also come from a combination of SMEs, large enterprises as well as from the government and public sector.
What are your future plans and projects?
We constantly innovate around the four major technology pillars namely cloud, mobility, social and big data (HANA is one). All our products will take advantage of these four technologies. The way you combine the four will bring a totally new layer of innovation. For example, we run HANA on cloud hosted by Amazon Web Services. Those who can use this can utilize cloud with HANA in memory computing. A mobile device which is utilizing this service is using a combination of mobile, analytics and cloud.
