SAP, the enterprise software firm helps large and medium firms better manage business operations and customer relations, says tiny business too is beautiful.

The NYSE-listed firm is building a programme called Project Ganges that is mandated to identify new business opportunities in emerging economies such as kirana shops.

A start-up project within SAP’s Global Business Incubator, Ganges would come out with case studies to tell what all small businesses should do benefit from IT solutions.

“We are doing research and development on how to make kirana shops benefit from IT. So far, only small IT is in use there. They use it mostly for point-of-sale. But there is a lot. They can use it to interact with distributors and product companies for inventory management,” Aiaz Kazi, Senior Vice-President (Platform, Products and Invention) of SAP, told Business Line .

The company is likely to come up with a product in two months for the small retailers. Currently, SAP teams are studying their needs, supply-chain, pain points and sweet spots in order to prepare a solution.

Aiaz Kazi was here in connection with the company start-up handholding initiative that it is promoting across major cities in the country. The Start-up Focus programme, launched last year, is aimed at helping the fledgling IT firms to develop new applications on SAP’s new real-time computing platform HANA.

Financial assistance

Besides giving the selected start-ups some IT solutions, the company might also offer them financial assistance through its funding arm. The initiative gives start-ups the opportunity to create easy-to-access solutions to manage ‘big data’ in real-time.

Big data analytics refers to the IT solutions that mine voluminous data to separate relevant data points from the chaff.

>kurmanath.kanchi@thehindu.co.in

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