SAP Summit India 2005: Celebrating Success In India

The second year of the summit in India witnessed participation from more than
1600 delegates. Inspired by the resounding success, Alan Sedghi, President &
MD, SAP South Asia, advocated converting the summit into another SAPPHIRE - SAP's
global flagship event series organized in different regions.

Amidst the resounding hoots of Peshwa Tutaris and traditional dances by
Maharashtrian belles, the SAP Summit 2005 got off to a flying start in Mumbai.
Addressing the large gathering of SAP partners and customers, Leo Apotheker,
President and Member of the Executive Board, SAP AG reiterated the importance of
India in the overall business plan of the world's third largest software
company.

"Since beginning our India operations ten years back, we have moved
forward a long distance and today India is one of our eight strategic
countries," remarked Leo. No wonder, therefore, that the SAP Labs in
Bangalore will have more than 3,000 people by 2006 to become the company's
second largest development center outside Germany.

Not only in terms of manpower, the Bangalore development center is
strategically crucial too for the German enterprise applications major. A major
part of the NetWeaver development happened here; 40% of the manufacturing
solution was developed here as well as a large portion of the HCM (Human Capital
Management) solution. He also announced a center of excellence for NetWeaver in
Bangalore.

Applauding India on its success in continuing to attract knowledge work of
the world, Leo asserted that this only proves that democracy and economic growth
are not mutually exclusive. Going ahead, he predicted the four main challenges
for Indian companies -adaptability, pervasive information, customer intimacy
and command of information. However, he also cited examples of Indian
enterprises who have successfully withstood these challenges.

ABB India has proved that pervasive information can be the key to innovate
and Avaya GlobalConnect (formerly Tata Telecom) has done wonders in customer
intimacy. Tata Steel has leveraged IT applications like ERP and SCM analytics to
improve its client understanding.

Continuing on the same adulatory vein for India, he also opined that
flexibility and rapid responses to business model changes would distinguish
India from competition-he believes that India would definitely exceed
achievements of Europe and reach close to North America.

Further elaborating on SAP strategies, Leo informed that Enterprise Service
Architecture (ESA) would be the winning proposition for the company in future.
"We took a bold decision in 2003 to replace SAP R/3 with mySAP ERP and
likewise we now believe that ESA would be our future differentiator," he
added.

ESA is expected to boost productivity for enterprises through incorporation
of industry best practices, changing business process models as well as offering
flexibility of one platform that enables both. In this context, special
reference was made of SAP's Mendocino initiative undertaken in conjunction
with Microsoft.

Lastly, Leo also reinforced SAP's special emphasis on SMEs; out of its 657
customers in India more than 300 belong to this category. Incidentally, the
extensive adoption of SAP amongst SMEs ensures that it is almost the second
biggest employer after agriculture.

Charting SAP India's success

As the official host of SAP Summit India 2005 in the second year of the
event, Alan Sedghi was gung-ho on its resounding success. More than 1,600
delegates converged at the summit. Inspired by the success of the SAP Summit
India, he strongly advocated converting it into another SAPPHIRE, SAP's global
flagship event series organized in different regions.

According to Alan, SAP continues to advance its market share in the overall
enterprise applications market in India. With a 70% annual growth rate in
license revenues for two years in a row, SAP leads the ERP market with a market
share of 54 % and the CRM market with a share of 21%, as per IDC.

During FY 2004, SAP India added 120 clients to its roster, 75 of which were
from the SMB segment. These clients came in from many new verticals like banking
and retail. In retail alone, SAP bagged orders from Pantaloon, Eureka Forbes,
Barista, and RK Foodland.

The momentum continues in 2005 with over 60 customer wins already. Even for
leading edge technology like NetWeaver, India had 14 customer sign-ups in 2004.
India's contribution to SAP is noteworthy in yet another area. Enterprise
Services Architecture (ESA), SAP's service-oriented architecture with
NetWeaver saw a major traction in terms of skills adoption. In 2004 alone, India
produced 500 NetWeaver consultants to lead the world in ESA evangelism.

From a deal a day to five

SAP India recorded phenomenal growth in the Small and Midsize Business (SMB)
segment in the past year. In the Asia Pacific region (excluding Japan), the
year-on-year total software revenue growth for SAP solutions for SMB nearly
doubled in 2004, with an average of three new customers each working day of the
year. In the year 2003, the average SMB deal was one customer per day.

In 2004, SAP signed nearly 200 new mySAP All-in-One customers and more than
400 SAP Business One customers in APAC, underpinning another successful year of
SAP's two-tiered SMB solution strategy and bringing the total number of
current SMB customers in the region to nearly 1,000.

The first quarter of year 2005 has already touched the average deal rate in
the SMB space to five customers per day. While SAP's stars shone brightly in
the Asia Pacific region, it recorded phenomenal growth in the SMB sector in
India as well. In 2004, 75 Indian SMBs opted for SAP solutions — averaging a
new customer win every five days.

Building on the momentum, SAP India also announced that in the first quarter
of the current year (January-March 2005), the company has already signed 30 new
SMB customers. Today, SAP India has a total of more than 300 SMB customers.
Going forward, SAP sees its SMB business growing 2.5 to 3 times that of the
Indian market.

"There is a growing demand for cost-effective, highly scalable and
easily maintainable solutions among Indian businesses," said Pranay Mital,
Director, SMB Operations, SAP Asia Pacific.

"The need to address market challenges on a real-time basis and the need
for improved compliance are driving SMB businesses to integrate business
information into a single version of truth across the organization for effective
and efficient decision-making.

With mySAP All-in-One solutions, SAP along with its SMB channel partners is
delivering consistent business value to thousands of SMBs, helping them gain
competitive advantage with minimal costs."

Innovative small and midsized enterprises, including Kemwell, Unipatch Rubber
Limited, Panacea Biotec, Micro Borosil Glass, John Fowler (India), Associated
Capsules and Krishna Maruti. in India have selected SAP's business solutions
to help streamline their business processes, increase efficiencies and achieve a
rapid return on investment.

SAP powering India

SAP has been loudly proclaiming its increased focus on specific verticals -
one of the emerging domains is utilities, where SAP ISU has already carved out a
niche for itself. In India, utilities is still primarily confined to the power
sector, as it goes on an automation overdrive, thanks to gradual deregulation
and privatization of the different PSU electricity boards.

SAP ISU's gradual inroads into the Indian power sector have happened,
largely thanks to the efforts of Accenture in India. Sudarshan Sampathkumar,
Partner, Accenture informs that they can already boast of a host of marquee
clients in India using SAP ISU-biggest of them being Reliance Energy in parts of
Delhi, Mumbai and Orissa; other clients having worked with Accenture at
different points of time include State Electricity Boards like HSEB and MPSEB as
well as CESC of the RPG group.

The two biggest problem areas in the power sector where there is a crying
need for automation are distribution and customer service. Unlike in Western
countries, in India the starting point for automation are the power distribution
companies and not their power generation counterparts. "This is because
there is so much power leakage during distribution as well as illegal power
theft, that business becomes nearly unviable for power distribution companies.
The SAP ISU solution addresses this problem area; once distribution companies
are automated, then power generation companies would followsuit," explains
Sampathkumar.

Customer service is another area witnessing increasing automation-unlike
telecom utilities the state of the affair here is pretty dismal and things here
are looking up only after the Accenture-SAP association.

DQC News Bureau