 "SAP India")
German technology major SAP is bullish on India as a key market as well as a talent hub, said Punit Renjen, deputy chairperson of the supervisory board at SAP.
“From a SAP perspective, India is incredibly important not only from a standpoint of a marketplace but also where we attract and retain top talent to develop cutting-edge innovation for the rest of the world,” Renjen said at a media briefing in Bengaluru.
SAP has about 15,000 employees in India focussed on fundamental research and development (R&D). Nearly 40 per cent of the global R&D workforce is based in India.
Sindhu Gangadharan, managing director (MD), SAP Labs India, said the company has hired about 1,500 this year and the investments in artificial intelligence (AI) are expected to double.
SAP Labs is also constructing a new 41-acre campus in Devanahalli, near Bangalore International Airport, with a capacity to house another 15,000 people. “In the first phase, we plan to hire 3,000 by Q1 of 2025,” Gangadharan said.
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Earlier this year, SAP launched Joule, a natural-language generative AI co-pilot. Joule aims to transform the way businesses run and will be embedded throughout SAP’s Cloud enterprise portfolio. It will deliver contextualised insights from across the breadth and depth of SAP solutions and third-party sources.
“All the cutting-edge technologies such as Joule are being developed from India. That is one of the key differentiators between what SAP is doing and what some other players are doing,” Renjen said.
Talking about the India opportunity, Renjen said, “We are in the midst of a 15-20-year secular trend enabled by tech, which is going to fundamentally change the way we live and work. And SAP is right at the centre of it.”
In India, SAP is seeing growth across its four segments —government, large enterprises, small and medium businesses (SMBs), and digital natives, said Kulmeet Bawa, president and MD, SAP Indian Subcontinent.
SAP India has over 10,000 customers in the mid-market segment and 80 per cent of its customer base is from this segment.
Digital natives is an emerging segment for the German technology major and 59 unicorns from India run on SAP systems. “Mid-market is also the fastest-growing segment for us. Each of these segments is growing at a very fast pace,” Bawa added.
