SAP punches the local code

A fast growing public sector market, in addition to booming private demand particularly from small and medium businesses, is making India one of SAP AG?s most rapidly expanding geographies. The German software firm is pinning its hopes to a fair extent on the sub-continent, to take it past its stated goal of becoming the number two player in the global database management market by 2015

SAP India, a subsidiary of the Germany based technology major SAP AG, is set to launch a local language version of its solutions, coded in Hindi, that could make public sector enterprises and government departments its fastest growing vertical going forward. The firm?s localisation unit based out of India has been working on creating this version of its business applications for the past two years and has launched a pilot two months ago.

Public sector is already one of the most rapidly expanding business for SAP, and officials expect the new Hindi variant to be a huge hit with state administrations, the centre, as well as governing bodies such as treasuries and municipalities. While specifics are currently not available, SAP expects to launch the product in the next two to three months.

?Our Global Localistaion group, based in India, has developed a Hindi translation for our core business suite at the code level. The business case for it was very strong, and we see a pretty big opportunity for a product such as this. The pilot is already out, and the final offering will be released in about two to three months,? says Peter Gartenberg, managing director, SAP India.

In the last year, public sector has been one of the most rapidly expanding markets for the enterprise application software firm in India. ?We have been looking at PSUs, state government, municipalities, like the Mumbai municipal corporation, treasuries etc. Most governments around the world run SAP, and that is one of our specialties. And we expect to replicate that in India as well,? he adds.

Overall, the sub-continent is now one of the fastest growing markets, for SAP, driven by core categories such as business applications, and extensions such as mobility, analytics, cloud and database management. In the January-March quarter, SAP India was reported to have registered a 60% revenue growth, and has over 4900 customers. Its global figures indicate a growth of 11% year-on-year for the same period, to 3,350 million euro.

But the big bet in the country, is specifically on database management, in which it expects to become No 2 within the next few years. ?We started the database business last year. In the January-March quarter, we added a net of 20 customers in India, with some major migrations from competition such as Oracle. The next 12 months for us, is all about conquering the database market,? says Gartenberg. ?Globally, we had stated that we will be in number two in the database market by 2015, but in India, that could happen faster.?

The firm, which is a late entrant in database, currently ranks behind behemoths such as Oracle, IBM, and Microsoft. However, it says it is already seeing good traction. ?Within a year of launch, we have $1 billion in revenue from HANA (SAP’s data analysis solutions) and 3,000 customers evaluating it. It has been deployed with 100 customers, and 400 have purchased it,? says Steve Lucas, global executive vice president and general manager, Database & Technology, SAP.

HANA is said to have been largely develop in its Indian R&D center. ?This is one of our for India by India offerings,? states Gartenberg. SAP has almost 4,500 people in its India labs, which is also its second largest R&D base globally. While its offerings have some phase of development in the India labs, its cloud portfolio is largely being developed by the India team.

Last week, SAP India had announced its strategy for the database market, which it hoped would help it become the fastest growing database vendor in India. The strategy, based on real-time data platform offering, aims to reduce operating costs for businesses. It would integrate SAP HANA with database solutions from Sybase, an SAP company, and create an offering with in-memory acceleration for ?simplified? data management, SAP had said.

In India, SAP is estimated to lead in IT resource management software for companies with 47.2% market share. In other related IT solution, SAP is estimated to have 27% market share in IT business intelligence solutions and a 36% in IT solutions for supply chain management.