Ravi Chauhan wants to woo small and medium enterprises with a ‘bus full of solutions.’ This is part of the SAP India Managing Director’s strategy of making it easier for potential SME customers to procure solutions related to cloud, big data, mobility and analytics.

The German software maker today flagged off ‘SAP Innovation Express, a bus which will park itself near the customer’s premises across 12 cities in North and West India. “The entire idea is that customers can check out the solutions and speak to our folks without having to go away from their office locations. The roadshow will cover 5,000 km in all,” said Ravi Chauhan, who came on board SAP India in April.

In his previous role, Chauhan was the Managing Director of India and South Asia at Juniper Networks. From 2000 to 2009, Chauhan held leadership roles at Nortel Networks. He spoke to BusinessLine on the sidelines of a press meet to announce ‘Innovation Express’. Edited excerpts:

You have been with SAP India for about six months now. How’s the experience been given that you have transitioned from the networking side of the IT industry to the enterprise software side?

It has been a very exciting period and the transition has been interesting. I always believe that companies invest in information technology for three broad reasons — increase revenue, decrease costs and up customer satisfaction. What translates this intent into business results is application software, which is SAP’s strength. In other words, we build software that delivers business benefits to customers. Everything else — networking, storage and so on — plays a supporting role in achieving this goal. From that perspective it is very exciting to be in the centre of all action.

In 2008, SAP had termed India as the ‘Jewel’ in its crown. Interestingly, we have not heard this kind of commentary from the company ever since. Would your mandate be to take SAP India to the pole position in the SAP universe again?

Absolutely. SAP is a growth company and markets like India are growth markets. Therefore, the Indian market and SAP will always be attracted to each other. Our commitment to India is substantial as one of our biggest labs globally is located here.

As a company, SAP comes into its own when there are two factors that coincide – scale and complexity. That’s what you get in India and hence India is an ideal market for the solutions that we build. It is no secret that India is seeing lot of bullishness right now. If customers are investing, it augurs well for our business.

Will the company look at establishing a data centre unit in India going forward?

Well that’s a decision based on many factors… I believe that customers do not really care about where their data centres are located as long as we deliver on the service level agreements and response time commitments.

As long as we are able to do that, the location of the data centre does not matter to customers.

Some of your competitors have already experimented with something similar to SAP’s Innovation Express in India. Do you think SAP has been slightly behind the curve when it comes to reaching out to SMEs?

Every idea has its time. We think we have got the timing right given the kind of resonance we are seeing from the market. We see a high degree of acceptance and interest in our solutions and this initiative is a response to the trend. SME companies of today have global growth aspirations. They wish to utilise the same technology as their larger peers. This is what really inspired the whole idea of going out and connecting with these customers.

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