By Subramanian Ananthapadmanabhan, Senior Vice President and Head of Midmarket Business, 51ˇçÁ÷Asia Pacific Japan (APJ)

The pandemic and current geopolitical landscape are creating considerable disruptions across the global supply chain ‒ and for India, its business community could soon face rising demand for components and materials such as chemicals, electronics, semiconductors, and batteries.

While large enterprises have the operational and financial flexibility to cater to this surge, there aren’t enough of them in the Indian corporate sector to optimize its response. This, in turn, opens the door to a remarkable opportunity for the nation’s tens of thousands of smaller businesses to step into – not only to cater to the domestic market but also central to fulfilling India’s national ambitions of becoming a globally competitive player.

Fostering growth in the right places

Today, few firms populate the Indian economy’s most vital and dynamic segment ‒ ““. The nation currently has 600 large Midmarket enterprises with over $500 million in yearly revenue, and thousands more small businesses generating under $50 million a year. And in between is a gap in competitors (the missing middle), challenging the economy’s ability to scale up and maintain a trajectory of ongoing growth quickly.

To fill the vacuum of the missing middle, there is an immense opportunity for thousands of companies to rise from being small to midsize with the intention to grow into large Midmarket enterprises over time. Then, additional firms can move up as well, creating a dynamic marketplace that fosters innovation and adapts to change quickly to fuel meaningful financial progress.

To make that leap, businesses need to adopt a digital strategy. The , reported that 68% of midsize companies in India intend to retain or increase IT spending between 5% and 10%, prioritizing employee and customer engagement, security, and modernization to improve processes.*

Raising the game with Digital Innovation

The IDC finding makes it clear that midsize companies across India understand that technology is vital to their business continuity and resilience. With the right technology investments, they can increase operational agility, improve innovation, and accelerate time to market while overcoming significant challenges in talent shortages and cybersecurity. More importantly, cognitive capabilities, such as artificial intelligence (AI) and predictive analytics, can be embedded into applications to deliver enhanced employee and customer experiences.

Take, for example, . The leading innovator in automotive lighting replaced its paper-based HR processes with integrated, to make work more personal, satisfying, and empowering for its 9,000 employees. The digital transformation effort delivered a secure and stable system that eliminated information silos locked in e-mails, spreadsheets, and disconnected systems and established a single, self-service destination for employees to access HR, payroll, and learning resources.

In addition, employees, regardless of role, can gain new insights to expand on Lumax’s legacy of innovation. As a result, organizational compliance efforts, including payroll and purchase taxation, are more streamlined. More impressively, Lumax’s application of AI and industrial psychology to measure employee talent and make predictive talent decisions is helping the organization run more intelligently and improve the overall employee experience.

While technology adoption can help small and midsize or midmarket businesses gain a competitive advantage similar to that of Lumax, they must overcome challenges such as cybersecurity, the availability of digitally fluent talent, and in some cases, the cost of adopting and integrating new technology into the existing infrastructure. Even though freeing up capital is a substantial hurdle for many firms, digital transformation is no doubt a priority for getting operations back to normal.

According to IDC, nearly three-quarters of surveyed Indian midsize companies have planned or are planning to move to the cloud. The key to overcoming the cash crunch is migrating to a hybrid cloud environment. Nearly half of the respondents favored the agility, performance, and availability of matching the targeted workload to a public or private cloud. In addition, 11% preferred the flexibility to interoperate applications across different clouds as needed.*

Eliminating the missing middle

India has an ambitious goal to emerge as the hub that satisfies the world’s needs. This requires the nation’s companies to take immediate action and digitally transform themselves to take their place among midsize and larger competitors ‒ and eliminate “the missing middle” from India’s business vocabulary.

In 2022, 51ˇçÁ÷dedicated its energy and resources toward empowering small and medium companies throughout India to realize their full potential on the world stage with the initiative. In a journey spanning over 7,000 kilometers and 13 cities, 51ˇçÁ÷engaged over 10,000 businesses to see firsthand how cloud technologies can help prepare for a future of high-growth potential.

After this journey, starts the journey of the next million. The Transformation Express now premieres in the metaverse. Learn how to develop the right business models, gain efficiencies, fund innovations, and transform mission-critical systems with .

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The IT & ITeS industry today stands at an inflection point with newer and emerging technologies playing an instrumental role in steering India’s digital transformation. Under Kulmeet’s leadership, the council will work together to further strengthen the industry’s global competitiveness and foster its diverse array of priorities that will help foster India’s inclusive and long-term socio-economic growth.

Paving the Way for Digital Innovation and Transformation

Tasked primarily with “accelerating value creation through Digital Transformation and Focus on Emerging technologies”, the National Council on IT, ITeS & Digital Commerce is further focused on formulation of policies and implementation guidelines related to emerging technologies such as cloud computing, Internet of Things, Artificial Intelligence, Blockchain. Additionally, the council works with other stakeholders to integrate the efforts related to policy advocacy and thought leadership on cyber-physical systems such as Industry 4.0, logistics, Skilling, smart cities etc.

The importance of technology in driving a country’s growth has never been more apparent. As India continues its journey to become a self-reliant economy, it will be vital to leverage new and emerging technologies to accelerate digital transformation by creating a future-ready workforce, social entrepreneurship and promoting digital inclusion across all segments of the society. Associations such as ASSOCHAM have been at the forefront bringing industry, corporates, and governments to scale the impact of IT innovations. “In my role as IT, ITeS and Digital Commerce Chair, I look forward to partnering with all stakeholders in supporting the industry through IT policies and best practices conducive to the holistic growth of the entire ecosystem,” said Kulmeet Bawa, President, and MD, 51ˇçÁ÷India Subcontinent.

The National Council on IT & ITEs & Digital Commerce strives to forge partnerships with key agencies such as the Ministry of Electronics and IT, Science and Technology, Commerce and Industry, Micro, Small and Medium Enterprises, Telecom, and NITI Aayog to promote entrepreneurship, adoption, and application of emerging technologies for an inclusive growth.

About SAP:

SAP’s strategy is to help every business run as a sustainable intelligent enterprise. As a market leader in enterprise application software, we help companies of all sizes and in all industries run at their best: 87% of the world’s total global commerce touches an SAPÂŽ system. Our machine learning, Internet of Things (IoT), and advanced analytics technologies help turn customers’ businesses into sustainable intelligent enterprises. 51ˇçÁ÷helps give people and organizations deep business insight and fosters collaboration that helps them stay ahead of their competition. We simplify technology for companies so they can consume our software the way they want – without disruption. Our end-to-end suite of applications and services enables business and public customers across 25 industries globally to operate profitably, adapt continuously, and make a difference. With a global network of customers, partners, employees, and thought leaders, 51ˇçÁ÷helps the world run better and improve people’s lives. For more information, visit www.sap.com.

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For further information please contact:

51ˇçÁ÷Indian Subcontinent
Deepika Gumaste
Global Corporate Affairs
deepika.gumaste@sap.com

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When India began its digital journey in the 90s, we had limited bandwidth and dial-up connections that needed a prayer each time we logged in. Cut to 2022 – There are 1.2 billion mobile connections with 110 million being added every year. With 61% of Indians on the internet, we are one of the top global economies in the number of mobile-first digital consumers. Put simply, we are witnessing technology transformation in the truest sense all around us.

Digital Transformation – Ushering a New Wave of Innovation

If anything, the pandemic accelerated the adopting of digital ways of working and revealed to us that we had the ability to go remote. It turned our assumptions about the workplace and transactions on its head. This digital thrust is being enabled by a slew of government initiatives that are making the digital first narrative a reality. We are looking at secure, presence-less, paper-less, and even card-less transactions in the future that will reinvent the ways that we know business works today.

There is no questioning that the past two years have been tough on us. But even in this landscape, we have seen start-ups and venture capitalists demonstrate success stories. Business models being disrupted by challengers that are forcing us to re-look at our long-held beliefs. In fact, we have seen changes in the way businesses work every month in the last 2 years. Young companies are questioning established norms and blending learnings from verticals to ring in a new order of business.

We sensed this shift, and in June 2020, we launched the . It was aimed at making Indian businesses more globally competitive. We brought them on to the Ariba platform to give them world-wide visibility and sure enough, right through December 2021, we saw a spike in engagements, driven by this digital initiative. To understand our customers better, we partnered with IDC to commission the to garner insights into the minds of small and medium business owners. It was our deep-dive to better understand our client base, as 80% of 51ˇçÁ÷customers are from this segment. I will speak of two major insights that reaffirm our commitment.

India – Transitioning Into a Digital-First Nation

First, despite not having a great couple of years, 68% of businesses expressed a desire to increase IT spending in the coming year. If you think this bodes well for a digital-first nation, wait for the second insight: 74%, that is almost 3 in 4 of the businesses surveyed intend to move into the cloud in the coming year. This is a game-changing trend in my view, as it talks about innovation at an unprecedented scale. The high-technology innovation game used to be played mostly by the larger companies – now this is being democratized by innovation moving down to smaller companies as well. These insights opened our eyes to the way the mid-market segment sees digital technology as an enabler to their aspirations, and to fulfil India’s dreams of becoming an economic superpower!

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51ˇçÁ÷Transformation Express – Empowering and Digitizing the Midmarket Sector

This gave birth to our flagship project of 2022 – the . Since the majority of our client base wants cloud innovations, we took this technology to their doorsteps. Our mobile experience centre traversed the length of the country, clocking 7000kms while showcasing the power of data, cloud innovations and the pathway to building digital resilience. While business disruptions may happen, digital resilience allows your business to bounce back and even harness the change for good.

The Transformation Express experience offered an immersive and interactive showcase of role-based solutions along with a peek into the future with drones and virtual reality (VR). It opened up possibilities for solutions in the cloud, with sessions for college students with both industry experts and cloud practitioners. It partnered our clients and local chambers of commerce to script a new chapter in the digital narrative that is going to drive our nation’s growth. With this, we recommit to the transformation needs of corporate India, its business owners and to the aspirations of our youth. To offset its carbon footprint, we planted a tree for every kilometre the bus travels – that’s 7000 trees planted.

The past 45 days have been a whirlwind with the Transformation Express anchoring 27 events for business leaders, experts, thought leaders and the government. We hosted over 150 speakers and panellists and engaged over 7500 businesses. Over 1500 students from 6 educational institutions joined the ride, as the bus visited 13 cities across 10 states in its epic 7000-kilometre journey.

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Thank you for helping to make this journey the incredible success it has been. For me personally, those words of wisdom came alive: it really is about the journey and not the destination.

about India’s digital journey with the Transformation Express.

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