German business software maker SAP is betting on a realignment of its India business unit with Europe, Middle East and Africa (EMEA). In an interview with FE?s Goutam Das, SAP?s senior vice-president (SME, EMEA and India) Luis Murguia says the region, a repository of domain expertise, will help India grow faster. Excerpts:

India has been reporting to Asia Pacific Japan. How will the realignment to EMEA benefit?

The alignment of India with Europe is not about commonalities. It is what makes us different. Great partnerships are made when you have different people with different values. Europe is a very mature market, growing very slowly. It has pre-defined processes and activities, a lot of history in running the business, and a lot of tools as well as resources. India is the opposite. It is a high growth, very dynamic market but with not enough history to build the different tools. Europe brings resources to India to grow faster. And India gives Europe growth. Last quarter, India was our fastest-growing market in EMEA and our second-largest market after Germany.

SAP executives have been talking about an ?acceleration? strategy. Can you help us understand what this means?

It means putting more resources than we did in the past. Doubling the number of inside sales people, increasing by 50% the number of partners, and having significant functionality on our solutions.

What are resources the firm is pumping in to develop India?s SME segment?

We want small & medium businesses to run well. Small companies are not isolated, but they don?t have the visibility of the large companies. So we have to bring several things to the table. One is a solution portfolio custom-made for SMBs that can be implemented in a short period of time with a low investment. The second leg is reach. SMBs buy from local companies. We are going to ensure that in every city in India, there is a local company that knows SAP and can implement SAP. Third is to provide easy access to SAP. So we will invest in inside sales. These are the three pillars we are working on right now.

In terms of delivery, what is working among SMEs? Is it the hosted model?

In Europe, over 80% of the implementations in the last three years have been on premise-installed at the customers? facility. However, there is a trend coming -the ?on demand? concept. So the 80% will eventually decrease this year. Then we are beginning to see another trend – on device. We are well-positioned to lead the on-demand ERP business and we are going to create a foundation for on-device. In India so far, it has been on-premise. But we are seeing some amount of interest in hosted. Large companies might host small applications. Smaller companies may do some critical functions on the hosted model.

What would ?on-device? ERP look like?

Reality is that today, for every desktop or laptop computer, there are five cell phones available. There is a proliferation of devices?cell phones, PDAs, tablets etc. There is a huge diversity of devices that humans use to interact with the digital world. We need to ensure that SAP can be accessed from any of these multiple devices that are coming to the market.