Technology for MSMEs: The enterprise solutions provider SAP India is betting big on the mid-market segment in the country. “The rate at which we are adding net new logos (clients) in the mid-market category is much faster than what we have ever seen before,” its Mid-Market Senior Vice President for Asia Pacific Japan Subramanian Ananthapadmanabhan told Financial Express Online on the sidelines of the launch of its mobile experience center, Transformation Express in Delhi.
He added that the tailwinds introduced by the pandemic where organizations had to shift to remote work led to the realisation that remote work is not about working from different locations but a decentralised way of managing the entire company, even if it is a manufacturing unit, from anywhere.
Of the 13,000 client base, SAP India has 80 per cent of its customers in SMB segment. SAP India defines the mid-market segment as companies that have a turnover of less than Rs 2,000 crore.
The biggest change in technology uptake, said Ananthapadmanabhan, in the mid-market category, is in the adoption of integrated solutions that include an array of offerings including ERP, supply chain, customer experience, employee experience instead of the earlier trend where they would purchase one solution at a time and postpone the other tech investments. “There used to be a time five years back when technology was a prerogative of only the large enterprises, but today cloud and its operating expense model has changed the dynamics completely.”
The sectors generating the most demand for digitalization are IT and ITeS, CPG companies, life sciences and pharma, engineering, construction and manufacturing, and the new addition to the lot is real estate.
To reach deeper into the smaller pockets of the country, the firm relies on its 600 partners for sales and service. However, to further strengthen this partner ecosystem and drive cloud adoption, SAP India today launched its mobile experience center called Transformation Express.
The Transformation Express is essentially a bus, equipped with the full range of SAP India’s cloud offerings, that will travel over 7,000 kilometres over the next 45 days. Starting from Delhi, the bus will travel to 13 cities including Gurgaon, Ludhiana, Jaipur, Ahmedabad, amongst others to give SMEs a first-hand experience of product demos and virtual reality exhibition of the advantages of having a cloud-based digital infrastructure.
