India has a hand in all SAP innovations

India is a market that has enormous choices when it comes to the cloud, believes Bill McDermott, co-CEO, SAP AG.

"You have a hybrid environment where you could have a private could or you could bring innovation in to a public cloud. So what we want to do is give customers a choice and India is a market that likes choice," he said, while elaborating on SAP's initiatives in the cloud in India. He also said that India contributes in a big way to all innovations in SAP.
McDermott was speaking in an exclusive interview to TOI at the company's annual global business technology event, Sapphire Now, in Orlando, Florida.

Excerpts:

What is your emerging market strategy?

I believe the emerging markets have emerged. In India where we have huge development centers and are doing lots of innovation, we are expanding with the ecosystem partners and creating a great business network. What we are doing today is capitalising on our great brand, the breadth and depth of our customer installed base and the net new customers we are gaining in the mature ones, while planting the seeds and building strong large workforces in business networks in the ' emerging markets'.

SAP has one of its biggest R&D units in India. What are some of the major products/ solutions that have come out of these labs?

The way we kind of develop is that we rapidly deploy assets around the world in different developments centers at different times. So India has got a hand in all the new innovations. India has a hand in mobility, a hand in HANA, there is obviously a hand in cloud because lots of things that we are doing now by Business By Design is an example of products/solutions being done in India.

What are SAP's initiatives in the cloud, in India?

Business By Design for mid-size enterprises and for subsidiaries of big companies -- that's available in India in the cloud. Business One solutions in the cloud is also available in India. Then you have a hybrid environment where you could have a private could or you could bring innovation in to a public cloud. So what we want to do is give customers a choice and India is a market that likes choice.

Organisations, particularly in India, remain wary of moving business-critical applications like ERP to the cloud. How are you addressing that? If a customer doesn't have the incentive or the desire to move an ERP instillation to the cloud, then they shouldn't. But there is some economics that they may be able to gain by moving their installed base into let's say a private cloud, where they can virtualise the hardware and can create some economies of scale with what they have already invested in.

How much more affordable would the cloud solutions be, compared to traditional licensed products?

Overall cloud is not necessarily always cheaper - especially in the long term. With cloud the big advantage is the ease of consumption. The problem with cost has never been the license itself, it's been on the implementation. The big idea is to take hardware out of the equation, take unnecessary services out of the equation and run your business in a far more lean manner.

How is HANA (your in-memory computing solution) doing in India? And what potential does it have in the Indian market considering the volume game is in the SME space?

If there is a market that's more opportune for big data or HANA than India I haven't seen it yet. We think that we can move big data into HANA into main memory and completely change the game. It would be at a different cost model, a different speed model, and a different service model. So the first thing we have to do is change people's minds that HANA is real and it can change the game. This year we plan on having a couple of thousand customers up and running on HANA. India would certainly have its fair share percentage of that. I'm saying: if we are going to do a couple of thousand installs around the world, I think India alone could have 2,000 HANAs.

Mobility is a big focus for everyone. What steps have SAP taken to make its solutions accessible on mobile devices in India?
I think there is plenty of room and I'm not completely convinced that India has gotten the memo that SAP is the number one mobile business software company in the world. What's fascinating about the Indian market is even if the market were growing at a rate of 10,000% year-on-year, that wouldn't even keep up with true market potential. That's how big the mobile market is in India.

It's been two and a half years since SAP put in place a co-CEO model. Can you share your experience and is this model sustainable? Some Indian companies have experimented with the model but have met with no success.

There are a couple of reason why it works well at SAP. One is we have had a culture of co-CEOs since the founding of the company. We respect the idea of balance of power. It's healthy. Jim Hagemann Snabe, my fellow co-CEO, focuses more on the technology side, while I focus more on the customer and market side. Not that the domains are exclusive, it's just that it's our priority areas. Besides, we are in two different continents, which means we are covering more area for the company. Finally as it relates to vision and strategy of the company we are completely aligned and we have a passion for this company. I think the fun of it comes from the trust and the fact that we really think that two is better than one. Two hands are better than one, two feet are better than one, two sets of eyes are better than one. 

Source :  http://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/city/bangalore/India-has-a-hand-in-all-SAP-innovations/articleshow/13368277.cms

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