Heard of crowd sourcing to raise funds for a start up or even for producing a movie? SAP Labs India is using the same initiative to throw open its projects to employees across its R & D centres who can work on them depending on their level of interests.

SAP Labs India managing director Anirban Dey told Business Line that this innovative initiative started off in India and it has now been extended to other centres across the globe. “It is purely voluntary but those who work on these projects do it with passion and a high level of interest.”

SAP Labs India is the third largest R & D centre for the German-based software maker, SAP AG. There are 16 such SAP Labs across the globe.

SAP Ganges, a supply chain product was put together through the crowd sourcing model. This product was specifically made for India and proved that a large dedicated team was not required to put together a project of such size.

The same crow sourcing model is being used for SAP’s new sports and entertainment vertical. Kolkata Knight Riders (KKR), an Indian Premier League team joined hands with SAP Labs to put together an analytics’ solution to pick up the right players during the auctions to select the cricket team in February.

SAP engineers started working on the project as early as November. They gathered data base of six years which included each ball bowled during each of the IPL season. Each of the balls had 25 data points like inswingers or outswingers bowled, the number of balls left, or hit for a six etc. This was loaded in the Hana database and the engineers ran a statistical algorithm on it to come up with several buckets of players: top order batsman, left handed bowlers etc which allowed the flexibility to choose the players the team wanted. This threw up some interesting solutions like players who had similar skills compared with a star cricketer. This allowed the team the option to pick up lesser known player with similar skills at one-tenth of the cost in case it failed to pick up the star player.

This model impressed KKR’s CEO, Venky Mysore so much that it was used by the team to pick players during the auction. Four more IPL teams are apparently in talks with SAP to build a similar model for them as well.

Last year, SAP Labs rolled out a completely new platform where projects of any size can be posted and employees across the Labs can volunteer to work on them. It could be as small as seeking a couple of designers for certain number of hours or for some projects which require several hours of programming.

If there is a project in Shanghai, and is interesting enough, employees can volunteer to work on them. “Some of these opportunities are coming to the surface and the interested are getting connected with the interesting stuff,” Dey pointed out. The initiative has resulted in about 2,400 employees signing up for it and over 60 projects have been posted.

Based on this success, SAP Labs is throwing open this initiative to outsiders as well. Start ups are now allowed to leverage the company’s database management system Hana. Employees of the company too can work with these start ups.

Dey said the Indian operations of SAP Labs has evolved over the years and is now looking at innovation for the local markets. “Our biggest challenge is how do we create more value, more economic success in India.”

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