The Hindu Business Line : Leading from the India stable

The first quarter of 2008 was the most successful Q1 for SAP India and it also bagged the largest domestic deal till date in the quarter. The company grew its licence and consulting revenues by 67 per cent; While small and midsize revenue grew by 43 per cent, consulting and education revenue grew by 34 per cent and 100 per cent, respectively.

In a bid to understand what is making SAP tick in India, eWorld caught up with Ranjan Das, President & CEO, SAP, Indian Sub continent, who has been spearheading the Indian operations for about a year now. Excerpts from the chat:

How important is India in SAP`s worldwide strategy?

SAP India is at the centre of the SAP universe, both from a growth as well as an innovation perspective. In 2007, SAP India was the fastest growing region for SAP worldwide as we more than doubled our installed base to about 3,000 customers.

Moreover, SAP India is the third largest subsidiary for the company globally, after the US and Germany. A lot of the architecture-related work on important solutions such as CRM (Customer Relationship Management) 2007 and business by design is being done out of SAP labs in Bangalore and Gurgaon. Many of the 27 industry-specific solutions that SAP focuses on have been partly developed in India. Our operations here also take the lead when it comes to localisation of products.

You recently opened the 50th e-learning centre for SAP in India? How are these centres panning out and what is the target, going forward?

Again, I must tell you that India was where SAP started the e-learning model; our education team here came up with this idea. In other countries, people in the semi urban or rural areas would to go to the nearby city to get the requisite training. In India, that is an expensive proposition. With e-learning centres, we circumvent the geographical barrier.

If you have access to the Internet, you will have access to SAP`s curriculum and eventually become a SAP-trained consultant. I can proudly say that e-learning is best practice that we have exported to the rest of the world. It is ‘innovative’ in the true sense of the word and we foresee many such firsts from our India stable. The e-learning model has now been adopted by SAP in the US and some other countries. Yes, we intend to increase the number of e-learning centres, going forward, and we are working out the finer details.

The government space is emerging as a key spender in IT automation today. What is the kind and nature of the work that you do here?

It depends. In some cases, we work directly with the government or quasi government entities. Otherwise we would be a part of a consortium working with systems integrators and other channel partners. Essentially, we want to have a model that would best suit the interest of our customer. At all levels, we believe we are automating and optimising the business processes for these government entities, making them more efficient.

Just to give you an example, we work with the ‘Coalmines Provident Fund’ that used to be a non-automated system. When people retire, many of them would have money left in the provident fund but they would not be able to access it freely. There were middlemen stealing money from them.

So SAP automated the entire process of managing the retirement funds and then we made it available to them through kiosks established across the country. Even people who do not know how to operate computers can go directly to the kiosks and access the funds.

This imitative has touched the lives of about 3.5 million people by eliminating middlemen. We have kiosks across the country. We also build citizen portals such as the one for the Municipal Corporation in Mumbai. The information comes from multiple sources, but SAP offers a consolidated view to the citizen.

The technology space in India is facing an acute shortage of trained manpower. How are you doing on the people front?

I agree that it is a challenge to attract the right kind of talent in a booming economy like India. Having said that, our attrition rate here is in ‘single digits’, which is much better compared to industry standards.

Yet, we do feel the talent crunch, especially in areas such as risk management and compliance. However, I firmly believe that having a good team in place can attract the best talent. As they say, A players attract A players while B players attract C players! About 40 per of our hires are through internal referrals, which means that individuals find it attractive to become SAP consultants.

adith@thehindu.co.in

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