New Delhi: Global software solutions company SAP SE announced the launch of the SAP Digital Boardroom in India on Thursday. Built on the SAP BusinessObjects Cloud solution, SAP Digital Boardroom aims to contextualize and simplify performance reporting across areas of business in real time. In an exclusive interaction with Channel Times, Deb Deep Sengupta, President & Managing Director, SAP Indian Subcontinent, said that the company was intended to leverage its partner ecosystem to position the offering in the enterprise and SMB segment.
“SAP Digital Boardroom is not about implementing a digital technology, but it is about making a cultural shift. Most of the organizations in India have grown based on departmental and process view over the years. Today in the digital economy, where huge amount of data is being generated every second, organizations are rapidly moving towards the data driven culture. Digital Boardroom helps businesses to bring in structured data, unstructured data and metadata in a one single view, so they will not only have internal view, but external and third party view to analyze any situation in real time. We are doing some advance pilots with some of our customers and we are seeing a lot of interest among the partners, who want to drive the digital transformation journey of customers jointly with SAP”, Sengupta said.
SAP is also developing a base of Independent Software Vendors (ISVs) to encourage them build applications on SAP HANA platform and provide infrastructure and software services. To enable that SAP has launched a new ISV partner program to on board new partners. The company has close to 150 partners, 70 HANA Cloud Platform ISVs and about 400 ISVs in India who develop applications on the HANA platform.
Talking about SAP’s channel engagement in India, Sengupta said that the company engage with global service partners and large SI partners such as TCS and Wipro and reseller partners such as Sonata Software in India. SAP follows the Geography based business model based on industry clusters and micro verticals. These clusters and micro verticals are aligned to specific partners who drive the business in that particular segment for the company. He said that the recently announced new channel initiatives would help the company on board new partners with different skills.
SAP has announced various channel initiatives to drive the growth of its channel business in 2016. The company recently announced the expansion of its Cloud Partner Program with the new referral option. SAP currently has close to 15, 000 partners in the PartnerEdge program worldwide. The company also launched the SAP SuccessFactors app center at its SuccessConnect event happened in August. The app center intends to give customers easy access to partner software applications that integrate with SAP SuccessFactors solutions. SAP has formed Partner Advisory Board to enhance and expand its channel network.
“We are seeing a lot of transformation in the channel business in India where reseller partners are migrating to the cloud in a big way and services partners are moving towards automation. We have programs for both the set of partners to help them expand their business with SAP”, Sengupta said.
Headquartered in Gurgaon, SAP is focused on over 20 industry verticals in India, having a significant market share in the Government vertical, especially in PSUs. According to Sengupta, 65 per cent of India’s GDP runs in the SAP system and 70 per cent of corporate taxes are with SAP customers. The company said it would continue to invest in the technological innovation and channel expansion in the country.
“We believe that we have a role to play in the nation building and bring businesses on a digital platform. We believe in driving the digital transformation agenda with large companies and we believe that we can make Indian SMBs globally competitive by getting them best business practices. We want to be an innovation partner of choice for customers and partners”, Sengupta said.