SAP, the world?s largest enterprise software company and the third largest independent software vendor, continues its growth momentum in India. Peter Gartenberg, managing director, SAP India, shares his insights on the company?s growth strategy for India, cloud computing as a model and their recently announced Business Intelliegence (BI) on demand solution in the country, in an interview with FE?s Ayushman Baruah. Excerpts:

What is SAP?s growth strategy and are there any acquisition plans on card?

We are accelerating our innovation strategy to bring technology that is more intuitive and pervasive, empowering the everyday user across the customer organisation. We will continue to leverage our three key assets which include people, portfolio and customers to contribute to the momentum for India?s growth as a high performing market for the region. Further, SAP India?s alignment to Europe, West Asia and Africa (EMEA) will enable rapid acceleration in the adoption of business practices and content that have proven to be assets to our customers as well as to our own operations. EMEA has a wealth of resources that will be broadly be shared with India to achieve an optimum level of best practice sharing. This decision enables both SAP and its 4,300 customers in India accelerate its innovation strategy and achieve optimum level of global best practice.

On acquisition, our strategy relies largely on organic growth. As an organisation we will not shy away from an acquisition if it makes sense for our customers.

What opportunities do you see for SAP in the country? Where do you see the new growth opportunities coming from?

In 2010, our key priority will be to build on our customer feedback. We will offer new products and technologies that speed implementation, provide instant consumption, and enable access from anywhere, anytime, through a broad range of devices. However, SAP will continue to strengthen its core businesses in offering solutions that address the most relevant issues confronting customers such as resource losses and under utilisation of assets in the core sectors of Indian economy. While we look forward to successfully executing against our customers strategy for sustainable growth, SAP is all set for a margin expansion and maintain its top-line growth. We will continue with the growth momentum in India as it is amongst the high performing markets in the region.

The next wave of growth opportunities for SAP will come from sectors including infrastructure, telecom, utilities, manufacturing, and public sector amongst others.

What is your opinion on cloud computing as a model? Do you see it taking over the traditional business models completely?

SAP believes that cloud computing is a natural, complementary extension to on-premise and on-demand business applications, so it promises more agile and cost-effective deployment of business capabilities for our customers.

We augment this cloud offering with new services that can be delivered by us in the cloud. These are narrow applications ? like talent management, salesforce automation and pricing optimisation. Most of our customers have very substantial investments in their data centres. In the foreseeable future these investments will see a dual, hybrid world of private and public clouds. We will deliver or are already delivering these in the form of integrated and complementary services.

SAP recently announced the SAP Business Objects Business Intelligence (BI) solution in India? Could you elaborate on that?

Customers today are looking for solutions that are complete and approachable to the everyday user. SAP?s Business Intelligence On Demand (BIOD) uniquely positions the company to address this new reality of hybrid deployments, which works with an organisation?s existing on-premise and on-demand investments. The solution brings end user empowerment and insightful dashboards to the cloud. It helps business users get up and running in a matter of minutes without prior training.

BIOD is offered in three editions to address different needs of each customer. The free edition provides everyone the opportunity to experience the offering which is made available on http://www.biond-emand.com. This is a strong example of SAP making it easy for customers to try, buy and consume our software.