“SAP has broadened its approach to go significantly beyond ERP”

What is
SAP's go-to-market strategy?

We have
established a strong portion of SAP's entire revenue, driven
through partner ecosystem, that might be significant for SAP but not
far good enough. href="http://www.dqweek.com/SAP-eyes-PSUs-and-e-gov-projects">SAP
has set a very ambitious core position in the
market that it wants to become a company of €20 bn by 2015 and
wants to retain 1 bn users.

Any business
that one can think of should be run by SAP. In order to achieve such
a vision we are moving significantly beyond ERP. It has made us
strong for 35 years, but we also realized that we can address
certainly a large market and we can explore much more. SAP has
broadened the approach to go significantly beyond ERP.

What are
the recent market trends you have observed?

We have seen
a significant trend for on-demand solution, so we are clearly
evolving a cloud strategy, business by design, which is an ERP
solution running on cloud. But we are also adding business solutions
running on cloud. Sales on demand is a perfect example for that.

Apart from
whole movement towards cloud, we see a major upsurge of mobile
enablement of all businesses across the world. It is perceived that
India is immediately jumping ahead towards mobile. Smartphone
proliferation is very big here. We have acquired Sybase to become
number one player here. Mobile clients will be our future. We will be
building mobile platforms and also building mobile apps. The third
major element of our portfolio expansion is to launch big data.
Companies need analytics on huge number of data and we are building
products to manage and analyze huge amount of data at very affordable
cost for companies.

Altogether,
we see 3 major market trends. Mobility is the big trend and big data
trend is the second one and the third is that the market is turning
towards the cloud which is why we are building our on-demand
portfolio and making our portfolio cloud ready.

What has
propelled SAP to win over its competitors?

In India,
whenever we deal with customers we try to talk in the industry
language, and only then they have the trust to buy our products. We
have 1,70,000 customers including Sybase and 1,20,000 customers
excluding Sybase. We have thousands of references all over the
world, who testifies that once a SAP solution is implemented it makes
business better. So when we look into the true business acceleration
side, SAP has huge records, and customers look into this.

Are you
happy with the existing channel partners. If yes, then is it a period
of consolidation?

I have
observed channel partners in India, and I must say that I am deeply
impressed with them. I would say that it is a period of growth. I
think we clearly had a period of consolidation about few years ago.
Consolidation is a function of channel maturity and market coverage
but I think in the Indian economy there is a room for more partners and
to uncover other markets in India. In the Asian markets, Indian
channel is very self-sustaining, and they know how to run and
understand their business, as they don't depend on SAP mothership.
There is so much market opportunity here.

What is
your channel strategy for 2011?

First we
ensure that major portfolio innovations exposed to channel in India.
For example, mobility is present here. I want partners to pick up the
portfolio and really drive that an additional incremental business
for their own. SAP has made a choice to cover entire SME market
segment through partners only, no direct involvement. That means if I
want to sell to a customer in that SME market, I will need a partner.

Therefore,
it
is crucially important to have mobility being brought to the
channels. We also had couple of boot camps recently in India where we
trained partners on how to use and sell our mobile platforms to their
own customers. That's one example of how we are driving the
portfolio expansions in the channels. I have significant expectations
with mobility. Second we want to grow our coverage both in single
tier as well as multi-tier distribution models. We need more
partners in small cities and also existing partners to recruit more.
The coverage expansion holds the second most important channel
strategy.

Overall we
see that SAP portfolio is not only ERP anymore. We can't sell
products all over by ourselves by 2015 on a global aggregate basis
and if we want to drive 40% of our software license revenue through
non SAP field base channels compared to the last year, which was
little bit below 20%, I need more and more partners for all these
portfolio
innovations.

How
important is India for SAP?

Indian market
is strategically very important to us. SAP does a lot of business in
all kind of economy but looking on the growth agenda where economies
are doing exceptionally well, India is one of the places. And this is
where business is being created.

We are
putting significant investments in literally every other brave
market, in which, India is one amongst Brazil, China, and Russia. We
have dedicated plans and huge investments to accelerate the market
position. India in particular is the market that not only from the
channel perspective but from the SAP's corporate perspective is
absolutely keen to be the number one player in the market and be the
strongest.