From customising its global products for the Indian market, SAP Labs India is now building products for India from scratch in a bid to capture the country?s unique business requirements. While an employee-attrition management software was the first off the block last year, the Bangalore-based lab, SAP?s second largest R&D centre globally, is set to roll out new products for problems like correcting addresses in a database and managing files in a government department. The focus is equally on easier-to-use software with dashboards and local language interfaces to tap a large market of new users, Navaneet Mishra, vice-president, globalisation services, at SAP Labs India tells Ajay Sukumaran. Excerpts:

You are building products from scratch for the Indian market as against localising your global products. Can you tell us more about this new direction?

In 1996-97, when we entered India, the idea was to find out the fundamental usage. The late nineties were typically finance and logistics, subsequently we moved into the HR space. Again it was not easy, the India payroll solutions was one of the most complex payroll solutions that exist in the world because of the multiple taxes and their impact and what all is possible. These were the earlier challenges when you try to take what is needed for basic business process and build into the product. That?s when we realised it?s not good enough to take a process and try to fit those boxes in. You have to start from scratch.

So what are some of the new products you plan to launch?

One is the policy management product for India. Then the other one is a file lifecycle management which in our internal jargon we call digital secretariat. The third is an export-import process for India. The idea is, from a business user, can you take it to consumer grade software? If you are creating anything in this age, you better create it consumer grade. You don?t go back to the old days when you need a consultant; hire him for months to run one scenario for your company. It has to be something very simple, drag and drop. It should be so intuitive, so automatic that a tenth grader should be able to do it without any training.

Will you extend these features to all your products? Is it aimed at getting more SMBs into the technology loop?

That?s the aim. We are investing hugely on usability and every aspect of it so that it becomes really easy to understand and use. See, business software will not become Facebook, the complexities are there. There are two aims. One is that the people who have never used software, so to say, should be able to use it. Not only that, but you bring in Hindi as well. The idea behind it is to bring in completely unseen users to the forefront now. The second part is for the companies that are already on SAP for multiple years and associated it with taking time to learn,

I am trying to tell them: ?Kill that perception. You take it, you go live in a week?s time.?

What is the kind of addressable market in the country for

these products?

For a product like file lifecycle management, by default you can always look at any government department. You handle all the correspondence in a digital way and can track it. The second part is creating transparency. Different governments, from Bihar to the central government, are talking about right to services. If you apply for a birth certificate, you are supposed to get it in seven days. Now, if I embed this, if I connect my file management with this kind of citizen services and if I tell them which files are stuck with which officer, I am done.

The other people who have shown interest are from the telecom sector because what is happening now is that they are receiving requests like crazy and they are also into multiple approvals and working a lot with channel partners.

What are some of the other areas you are working on?

The quality of addresses is something

interesting and hugely painful for India

compared to any other country I have known of. So there is huge demand for an engine which takes any address from multiple sources and can streamline it based on any

intelligence, text-based or map-based, and put it into one address. Initially, the case itself came from the insurance and financial

services sector. It is a huge revenue and business case for us and that?s why we have invested last year hugely in this. Now it is ready. To tell you the future story, we will not stop with address cleansing. We will go for material master cleansing.