DQ Top 20:#14 SAP India

SAP has joined the rush of enterprise technology companies positioning themselves in the cloud market. The company reports strong uptake in the Indian market-both for cloud applications and cloud platforms. SAP reports growth in double digits in India. In the applications space, the three areas with significant traction are procurement (Ariba), HR (SuccessFactors), and CRM. Two other high growth areas are analytics and e-commerce. Procurement solutions have found lot of favor, especially in the mid-market, SAP reports. SAP has been adding in excess of 100 customers per year from the midmarket segment over the past few years. More than 800 small organizations have been signing up with SAP every year.

Cloud platforms are also strategic for SAP. Ranbaxy Laboratories and Dabur India have been on the SAP cloud for over a decade have seen significant progress to transact, move, store, process, and analyze data in real time. SAP had also announced cloud infrastructure service to move applications on to cloud. Some organizations that have opted the cloud infrastructure include Dr Reddy's Laboratories, Shapoorji Pallonji, Balasore Alloys, Abu Dhabi Commercial Bank, Max Life Insurance, Asian Paints, TCL Corporation, Sun Pharmaceutical Industries and Lupin to name a few. SAP is also exploring the possibility of setting up a data center in India to support its cloud business.

In the past few years, SAP also saw significant growth in two new segments-BFSI and public sector, both late entrants into the ERP space. In India, the top 3 public sector banks, top 3 private sector banks, and the largest insurance company are SAP customers, the company reveals.
Department of Posts, Finance Department of Government of Andhra Pradesh, and many defense establishments too are on SAP and are diversifying into incremental solutions.

Specifically, in the public sector, the focus is on developing local solutions. Examples include applications like-Rakshak, TracOHealth and The "Milk Co-operative" Experience, conceived, designed and developed by SAPLabs India.

These applications, focused on specific industries, help automate several operational areas including, tracking & control; streamlining of procurement systems, budget and expense management, project & scheme implementation amongst others to turn data into actionable information and deliver services efficiently.

To expand the ecosystem, SAP is funding new ventures. SAP Ventures, the independent venture capital firm affiliated with SAP AG (NYSE: SAP), raised more than $650 mn for a new direct investment fund, SAP Ventures Fund II. Taken together with SAP HANA Real Time Fund, a $405 mn fund-of-funds that invests in early stage VC funds, SAP Ventures has added more than $1 bn in new funds in 12 months.

SAP also announced expansion of its partner ecosystem by appointing new partners across various areas. For mobility, Blue Star Infotech and ZenFocus; for cloud-Hexaware, NEC India, RS Social; for HANA-Persistent and Sify are the newly appointed partners.

SAP also reinforced its strategy of accelerating the Indian ecosystem by announcing an integrated approach to strengthen its newly launched OEM and ISV programs and encouraging partners to leverage the Managed Cloud as a Service (MCaaS) model to provide enhanced value to businesses.
Partners include Rolta, iCreate, TAKE Solutions, Arteria Technologies, Vantage Agora Inc, Defiance Technologies, NTT Data Solutions, IT Champs, and Compuage.