The Hindu Business Line : Many Indians in SAP expert community

SAP Labs lauded the contribution of Indian developers at its event TechEd'06 held in the city. The Business Process Expert community that was launched by the company two months ago has already registered 60,000 members, of which one-third are Indians, informed Mr Georg Kniese, MD Director, SAP Labs India.

Business process experts are not coders, but those with domain knowledge who can transform the way a business works to make it more efficient. The community of experts was set up to foster innovation in an open forum and obtain value, using (service oriented architecture). India has the highest share of contribution to the community. An employee of Wipro Technologies from Bangalore is the top contributor.

"India is taking a lead - it is a sign of the times," said Mr Nagaraj L. Bhargava, Director- Marketing & Strategic Initiatives, SAP India. There are 34,000 SAP consultants in the country and many others are contributing to communities such as BPE and SDN (SAP developer network) initiated by SAP Labs.

Engineers' efforts

Other contributions highlighted at TechEd include the efforts of Indian engineers in various products such as an oil and gas solution; emerging solutions such as xApps, mobile business solutions and Duet; hitech, apparel and footwear solutions and mySAP CRM for pharmaceuticals.

SAP Labs has two centres in India - Bangalore and Gurgaon and employs close to 3,100. The company recently announced that India was elevated to the status of a strategic hub. The new facility in Gurgaon will employ 600 who will work in customer service and custom development.

The company also announced that new deployment and business models were emerging and with more customers choosing service-oriented architecture, their market was growing rapidly. The company's $ 30 billion market (in 2005) for their products including ERP (enterprise resource and planning), CRM (customer relationship management), SCM (supply chain management), PLM (product lifecycle management) and SRM (supplier relationship management) will transition to a $ 70 billion pond in 2010, said Mr Zia Yusuf, Executive Vice-President, Platform ecosystem, SAP AG.

He added that the ecosystem played an important role in making this market and that partnership with Microsoft (for Duet), the platform strategy and mid-market segment would help it grow. There are approximately three lakh potential customers in the mid-market segment in India. SAP added 200 SME customers in 2006, and 75 enterprise customers.

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