SAP is building its India cloud strategy around data, infrastructure and operational sovereignty as the enterprise software company expands its presence in sensitive sectors including defence, railways and public finance, according to Manish Prasad, president and managing director, SAP Indian Subcontinent.
The company’s approach defines sovereignty across four dimensions — technical, operational, data and legal. Under the model, the technical infrastructure, including the control plane, would sit within India, while the people operating the systems would be local citizens. Customer data would also remain within the country.
The fourth layer is a legal framework that SAP is developing to address business continuity as geopolitical and regulatory risks evolve.
“We are probably looking at sovereignty across all the four angles, and then added an element of reliability, added an element of confidentiality and super confidentiality,” Prasad told Fe.
The sovereignty framework will sit beneath a tiered portfolio of cloud offerings, with the level of control varying according to the sensitivity of the workload. GROW with SAP is aimed at mid-market customers looking for speed and limited customisation, while larger enterprises can opt for SAP’s private cloud offering. Dedicated sovereign deployments would cater to the most sensitive and regulated workloads.
The approach also extends to cybersecurity, with SAP seeking to apply a common baseline based on the strictest standards across the markets in which it operates.
“What SAP does remarkably well is to look at all the regulations, all the practices, all the policies that are coming in from various governments, and that becomes a superset,” Prasad said.
Alongside its cloud strategy, SAP is also pushing the use of AI deeper into enterprise processes. Prasad said the company sees the evolution of AI in three stages — from consumer AI, which has already become mainstream, to point AI deployed within specific business functions, and eventually to an autonomous enterprise where AI can execute core business decisions.
SAP’s Joule 2.0 intelligence layer and AI embedded in processes such as hire-to-retire, record-to-report and design-to-operate are part of this transition.
However, Prasad said the standards for reliability and governance would have to become stricter as AI takes on greater autonomy, particularly when financial data and decisions are involved. SAP intends to retain a human-in-the-loop approach, with its enterprise resource planning systems providing the business context for AI-driven decisions.
India is also central to SAP’s engineering strategy. The country is the company’s largest engineering hub outside its Walldorf headquarters, with a second development centre opened in Bengaluru last year.
“India continues to be one of the fastest growing markets for SAP. It’s a huge opportunity for us,” Prasad said.