SAP Bets Big on India as an Innovation Engine
The technology giant is all set to double its staff strength at the innovation labs over the next three years to build on this opportunity
India is emerging as one of the fastest growing markets in enterprise and mid-market segments and the availability of highly skilled talent and a culture of innovation based on risk-taking puts the country in the position of an innovation engine for the world and a key driver for growth, says a senior executive at German technology giant SAP.
Scott Russell, an executive board member and in charge of customer success at SAP told ET in an interview that the enterprise software maker has clocked treble digit growth in India over three of the four quarters in 2021, making it one of the fastest growing markets for the company in the enterprise and mid-market segment for cloud services.
The company, which had earmarked $500 million for growing its business in India, said the growth perceived in the country results from more and more Indian companies seeking to expand their businesses to other geographies. SAP is among the companies that perceive this as a major opportunity to grow their own business.
Indian companies expanding globally
He pointed out that several top brands such as Tata Motors and Asian Paints were moving to the cloud as they charted out global expansion plans and this was resulting in SAP getting to showcase how technology can drive a strong narrative for these companies in terms of not just cloud computing but also digital transformation and agility.
Russell also noted that the company was enhancing the role of its innovation labs operating out of India to fuel growth through its constant engagement with domestic startups and the digital native community that SAP is fostering. He revealed that the company could double its headcount in the innovation lab from the present 14,000 members by 2025.
The company had decided to pivot into a cloud-led business in 2020 that has now become a $12 billion entity with a growth rate of beyond 24% year on year. Digital transformation efforts fuelled by the Covid-19 led lockdowns contributed significantly to this growth, Russell said, adding that the current geopolitical challenges could spur further spikes.
He highlighted the paradigm shift in some areas such as data sovereignty and privacy as well as the supply chain reorganization and said these factors would continue to define how enterprises operated from a just-in-time model to a just-in-case one that requires managing boundaries and working with multiple vendors.
