SAP India to go ahead with $1 bn investment

SAP India, the business software solutions company with operations in Bangalore, has said it expects to meet its employee headcount target of 7,000 by 2010 despite global economic slowdown. The company will go ahead with its commitment of $1 billion investment in India by 2010. So far, SAP has invested a little over $25 million to build phase I & II of SAP Labs India campus.

The company currently has close to 5,200 employees in India including 4,000 in its R&D division, SAP Labs.

“We are comfortable with 4,000- 5,000 employees for SAP Labs. We will leverage scalability for new product development,” said Peter Zencke, member of executive board, SAP AG. He said the company would invest the $1 billion for new technology, Service-oriented architecture (SOA), infrastructure and new designs.

On concerns about the company’s lackluster performance in the US in this quarter, officials said markets like India had made up for it by notching up high growth rates. “We have recorded a growth of 46 per cent in Software Revenue (in non-GAAP constant currency) in the third quarter of 2008, which is our highest in India so far,” said Ranjan Das, president and CEO, SAP Indian subcontinent, on the occasion of SAP TechEd 2008, its business and technical conference.

Das said the company has entered into an enterprise agreement with the Mahindra Group for consolidation of its systems.

The partnership will see SAP and Mahindra Group work together in standardising human resources, employee sevices, administration, finance, procurement and analytics under the SAP technology platform.

The company has also announced wider availablility of its remote learning offerings in the Asia Pacific region, claiming savings of upto 70 per cent compared to SAP Instructor-Led Training (ILT). Since its launch in India in 2007, 4,000 certificates have been issued. The courses are currently available in India, Singapore, Malaysia, Thailand, Philippines, Indonesia, Pakistan, China and Australia with expected rollout in Vietnam, Latin America, West Asia, Western Europe and select African countries by March 2009.

SAP AG has unveiled the ‘SAP enhancement package 4’, its latest set of innovations for the flagship enterprise resource planning (ERP) application. It has also announced its plans to resell CA Inc’s Wily Introscope solution as ‘SAP Extended Diagnostics by CA Wily’, an application performance management solution that helps web applications and web services meet goals.