Companies in Asia are more willing to adopt best practices

How do you assess the current economic slowdown? What impact are you

seeing on SAPs business globally and in India?



There is a lack of predictability amidst this global slowdown. Because of

globalization, things are connected around the globe now and in real time. This

also means that when the crisis started, it spread very rapidly. There is no

country where we dont have a challenging situation today. Most countries are in

the state of introducing various packages to bring trust back into the system

and try and regain the momentum.

We are seeing a lot of interest for anything that can get some stability and

we are accordingly aligning our product strategy. The analytics tool-set that we

acquired from Business Objects is very high in demand. The second area is to

gain more efficiency in the short term. They can be doing anything from

procurement in a smarter way to getting a control on the cost to reduce the

overall IT cost. Enterprises are looking at ways to adjust to the changed market

condition better than their competitors, and we are adjusting accordingly.

How does this translate into your product strategy?



The current market conditions have implications for our product strategy. We

are strongly positioning analytical capabilities and are working hard to

pre-integrate the Business Object toolset with the SAP transactional system. The

integration of Business Objects with SAP is largely done.

Next is the launch of Business Suite 7, whose end-to-end approach helps

overcome application silos and reduce TCO. This is based on an architecture

where we have build all the pieces ourselves.

SAP has been working on building business value faster and pre-packaging

parts of Suite 7 in smaller chunks, so that customers get smarter RoI. We offer

customers the best packages which are affordable, solutions that deliver RoI

quickly, and are sustainable in the long term. There are around twenty-five such

packages which can be quickly configured and can be delivered in ninety days or

less.

What is the primary focus of the newly created business solutions and

technology organization?



The idea was to blend our applications that are a combination of

technologies like SAP and Business Objects. We had a system with business suites

and tools for the unstructured world, and we wanted to combine these two

elements in better ways. We have business process management tools which allow

companies to build their own processes. We have unique opportunities to help

companies overcome the current crisis.

What kind of opportunities and challenges are you seeing on account of

explosive growth of mobile devices being used by enterprise users?



Mobile in Asia has become every persons device and I am aware of India

adding more than 8 mn users every month. There is an opportunity that is

incredible and bigger than any other device that is in the market. There is no

doubt that we need to be able to address the mobile users.

There is also a challenge associated with these mobile devices from the

enterprise point of view. Security is still an issue apart from the challenge of

updating a large number of devices with the recent software versions. Another

challenge is the quickly changing models of these devices, which means

enterprises would need a very strong infrastructure and back-end to sustain a

lot of consistencies and security issues. We have partnerships with RIM

(Research in Motion) for BlackBerry and Sybase for iPhone. I think there is a

big market for simple applications like note checking for reports, approvals,

etc.

What is SAPs small business strategy?



We have scaled down versions of our business suite called All in One for

rapid implementations. It took off in Asia more than in any other part of the

world. We used this approach to get into Asia. We at SAP believe that companies

in Asia are more willing to adopt the best practices, while other regions

discuss endlessly about other ways of doing things.

Sudesh Prasad



sudeshp@cybermedia.co.in