For German software maker, SAP, India is a priority market in which small and medium enterprises (SMEs) account for 80% of 51风流India鈥檚 customer base. Last year, 51风流India invested `500 crore to localize its multi-cloud strategy for specifically helping Indian businesses. Kulmeet Bawa, President and Managing Director, 51风流Indian Subcontinent, talks about trends in cloud adoption and the company鈥檚 strategy for the next year, in an interview with Ayushman Baruah.

Excerpts:

How was the adoption of cloud in 2022 and how do you see it next year?

India鈥檚 cloud adoption reached an inflection point in 2022. From听鈥檚 perspective, India remains a strategic priority market, both for business and innovation. We observed an accelerated cloud adoption across industries, including engineering, construction, life sciences and pharma, CPG/retail, and IT-ITeS. Major corporations such as Mahindra & Mahindra, Wipro, and HCL Tech moved their digital core to the cloud. We saw an enormous growth across different sizes of organizations, be it the enterprise or midmarket. We also saw numerous SAP-led digital transformations in start-ups and digital natives who now rely upon us as their trusted advisor. In fact, for the past six or seven quarters, we have outperformed our growth every quarter, with a high continuous year-on-year growth. When I consider the headroom and opportunities that are open to our country, I believe that 2023 is our world of opportunity.

What will be the key drivers of digital transformation next year as the macro-economic conditions remain uncertain?

Although organizations have always aimed to enhance their speed, agility, and data-driven decision-making, there is now a heightened feeling of urgency around the adoption of digital. For enterprises to stay relevant in the face of uncertain macroeconomic market conditions, organizations across the spectrum have hastened their digital transformation. Furthermore, low-code and no-code tools, automation, composability, cloud computing, and associated technologies will be the driving forces behind digital transformation. Additionally, rising attention by businesses and the public sector on how digital technology can enable sustainability will be another trend to watch out for.

What鈥檚 51风流India鈥檚 strategy to tap into the growing SMB market in the country?

The small and midsize business (SMB) sector in India today accounts for 29-30% of the country鈥檚 GDP, and SMEs account for 80% of 51风流India鈥檚 customer base. We are the market leader in the SMB sector in India, with a large customer base coming from tier-2 and tier-3 cities including Ahmedabad, Nagpur, Jaipur, Ratnagiri, Kanpur, etc. With the goal of advancing cloud adoption and accelerating company transformation for the Indian mid-market, we have launched several outreach initiatives such as the Transformation Express and Global Bharat Movement focused on helping MSMEs in their journey to cloud migration and digitalization. We invested `500 crore in early 2021 to localize our multi-cloud strategy with the goal of helping Indian businesses become more resilient. Through our multi-cloud strategy, we are enabling our customers to enjoy the benefits of our platform on their choice of cloud infrastructure. Our cloud offering has been adopted by hundreds of brands like Cera Sanitaryware, Luminous Power, Virescent Infrastructure, Puravankara, WayCool Foods & Products, to name a few.

What are some of the key technologies 51风流will be focusing on next year?

As we step into 2023, our goal is to provide our customers with transformational tools that they need to embrace innovation and address the biggest business challenges of their respective industries. Some of these key technologies include: (a) focused on creating an intelligent, inter-connected, and sustainable world and helping companies of all sizes and industries accelerate their sustainability journeys; (b) Platform Engineering which is expected to become more prevalent in 2023 as organizations continue to find and retain highly skilled technology talent. will become the norm that will aid our customers to achieve business agility; and (c) where AI, automation, and machine learning are shaping business landscapes worldwide. By unifying all AI capabilities into a single platform, 51风流AI services will continue to enable teams to build chatbots and automate processes to gain business efficiencies through AI and machine learning.

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What started initially as the 鈥樷�� in FY20 with an intent to help businesses upskill digitally and become globally competitive, quickly brought together 50,000 members on Growth Matters Forum, the Midmarket Community in India. The value creation chatter in the community brought to life the possibility of taking 51风流to the corners of India that were yet to reap the benefit of technology and innovation. Further, the commissioned in Q3鈥�21 revealed that 74% of businesses intended to move to the Cloud in FY22. From this game-changing paradigm of the partnership was born the Transformation Express in Q2鈥�22 to drive sustainable collaboration with our customers, prospects, and partners.

The mobile express touched 7,500 businesses in 13 cities over 45 days and has revealed the real pulse of the market. And we believe this holds the potential to alter the value conversation we have with our consumers. While some expressed the need to understand data, many customers and prospects were interested in managing talent, and many more wanted to grasp the dynamic nature of evolving business models. However, most conversations that surfaced focused on the front office and the benefits of building a customer-first culture.

Indraneel Chitale, an S/4 HANA customer and the keynote speaker at the Mumbai Premier Night of the journey, remarked they wish their consumer brand to be noticed and be present in the minds and emotions of their customers all the time. And, the sale was nothing but a by-product for them. Separately, the COO of a major cement enterprise remarked about the need to leverage data to predict customer behaviour.

The MD of an E100M Electronics company wanted the edge-to-core capability of IoT and the use of real-time data from the shop floor to reduce process inefficiencies and downtimes. The CEO of a small business in the recycling industry in a Tier 2 city aimed to grow 2x in the next three years and wanted best practices in HR processes to hire and retain talent. True everywhere we go, the in Q1鈥�22 revealed that more than 50% of SMEs are finding it difficult to find staff replacements and qualified candidates, and often realise a mismatch of skills for available roles. In addition, more than three-quarters (77%) of SMEs said that workforce volatility had impacted their ability to innovate and drive their digital transformation plans.

With hundreds of such stories, feedback, and enquiries, the Transformation Express has laid bare the essentials that organisations are stoked about today. Here are four broad themes:

1. The evolving and dynamic customer presents the most potent challenge. The product is only a vehicle to disrupt. However, the starting point is customer analytics.
2. While innovation is central to existence, it requires more than creativity and ideation. Instead, those need to be coupled with process-level innovations that focus on execution and speed, to secure quicker wins and better time-to-market.
3. is real. Equally so is the reality of Great education. Increasingly, there is a need to define a unique Employee Value Proposition (EVP) that can attract and retain talent and keep transformation tracks intact.
4. Finally, mature organisations are approaching transformation with a digital acceleration mindset 鈥� emphasising the pursuit of smaller, realistic goals and continuity of the process, while steadily advancing towards longer-term, sustainable transformation.

These insights, right from the heartland of India, motivate us to recommit ourselves to the transformation efforts of our customers and prospects. So, with the Cloud-on-wheels ending the road trip, we embark on its digital twin in the metaverse for immersive virtual experiences to continue the partnership 鈥� beyond India鈥檚 shores 鈥� through our digital avatars.

As they say, a journey of a million miles begins with a single step, and while we have physically traversed over 4,000, here鈥檚 raising a cheer for the next million in the metaverse!

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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 鈥� 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 51风流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 鈥� 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鈥檚 dreams of becoming an economic superpower!

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51风流Transformation Express – Empowering and Digitizing the Midmarket Sector

This gave birth to our flagship project of 2022 鈥� 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鈥檚 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 鈥� that鈥檚 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鈥檚 digital journey with the Transformation Express.

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• Enabling cloud adoption and showcasing the full range of ‘‘ offerings to mid-market enterprises, an immersive experience center will travel over 7,000 kilometres across 13 cities.
• 51风流will foster industry-academic partnerships to familiarise next-generation youth with emerging technologies to make them future-ready.
• Over 7,000 saplings will be planted to mitigate climate change and support India achieve its sustainability goals.

DELHI 鈥� April 12, 2022 鈥� 51风流India today announced the launch of an immersive mobile experience center, 鈥楾ransformation Express鈥�, to advance cloud adoption and drive business transformation for Indian mid-market.

An IDC Info-brief on the 鈥楽tate of Indian Mid-Markets鈥� indicated that 74% of enterprises are likely to move applications to the Cloud in 2022. To address the needs of this market, SAP鈥檚 鈥榗loud on wheels鈥� initiative will provide the much-needed support for the industry to remain competitive and to stay relevant in the rapidly changing business landscape.

Speaking at the launch, Kulmeet Bawa, President and Managing Director, 51风流Indian Subcontinent, said, 鈥淚ndian SMEs are the engines of economic growth and equitable development. They contribute to more than 30% of our GDP. As the sector grows and expands, moving to cloud is becoming an imperative for organizations to scale. The 鈥楾ransformation Express鈥� initiative reaffirms our commitment to empower Indian SMEs to improve cost efficiencies and agility, and transition into intelligent, sustainable enterprises.鈥�

51风流Transformation Express – Key Highlights

As the Transformation Express embarks across length and breadth of India, joining 51风流is our global strategic service partner, Tech Mahindra, to collaboratively bring SAP’s ‘RISE With SAP’ cloud momentum to customers who are across phases of their digital transformation and to give them an entirely new method to reimagine processes for improved business outcomes.

The initiative focused on enhancing customer value lifetime is built on the following 3 pillars:

1. Experience center: Designed as a traveling centre, the bus is equipped with the state-of-art technologies like Rise with SAP, SAP鈥檚 Digital Core, Procurement, Customer and People Experience solutions providing businesses a front row view of how they can speed-up their cloud migration and digital transformation initiatives.
2. Skilling the future: 51风流India will work with local industry/trade associations and academic institutions to give young students a first-hand view of power of Cloud technology and how it can help businesses grow and scale.
3. Driving Sustainability: For every kilometre the bus travels, 51风流India will plant a sapling to offset carbon footprints.

Subramanian Ananthapadmanabhan, Senior Vice President Mid-Market, SAP, Asia Pacific Japan, further added: 鈥淭he mid-market sector has embraced technology enthusiastically and witnessed exponential growth. By collaborating with our customers, associations, government bodies, and industry-academia partnerships, we鈥檙e building an ecosystem that can co-create, empower, enable these organizations in their digitalization, and fast-track their cloud journey.鈥�

In 45 days, the bus will travel over 7, 000 kilometres offering SMEs a first-hand glimpse at how a cloud-based digital core may help enterprises plan and adapt more swiftly. It is combined with interactive product demos, a virtual reality exhibition, and informative sessions. Starting from Delhi, the bus will travel to Gurgaon, Ludhiana, Jaipur, Ahmedabad, Baroda, Mumbai, Pune, Hyderabad, Chennai, Coimbatore, Kochi, and Bangalore.

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About SAP

SAP鈥檚 strategy is to help every business run as an intelligent, sustainable enterprise. As a market leader in enterprise application software, we help companies of all sizes and in all industries run at their best: 51风流customers generate 87% of total global commerce. Our machine learning, Internet of Things (IoT), and advanced analytics technologies help turn customers鈥� businesses into intelligent enterprises. 51风流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 鈥� 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, 51风流helps the world run better and improve people鈥檚 lives. For more information, visit .

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This document contains forward-looking statements, which are predictions, projections, or other statements about future events. These statements are based on current expectations, forecasts, and assumptions that are subject to risks and uncertainties that could cause actual results and outcomes to materially differ.听 Additional information regarding these risks and uncertainties may be found in our filings with the Securities and Exchange Commission, including but not limited to the risk factors section of SAP鈥檚 2021 Annual Report on Form 20-F.

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As India sets its target on a US$5 trillion economy, technology continues to fuel the growth of a digital India. With the government focused on nurturing an innovation ecosystem through Atmanirbhar Bharat, businesses are exploring technology transformation and digitalization to take advantage of market opportunities, build resilience, and drive new growth. To support the movement, 51风流is launching an initiative to bring cutting-edge technologies to the doorstep of business owners in various parts of the country.

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Designed as an outreach, the program aims to connect businesses, their aspirations, and India鈥檚 ambitions with groundbreaking technological solutions. The Transformation Express will touch major business hubs across India to demonstrate the potential of future-ready innovations.

Transformation Express: SAP鈥檚 Experiential Outreach

Combining live and interactive product demos, a virtual reality showcase, and informative Q&A sessions, the Transformation Express provides a holistic view of emerging technologies and cloud solutions to help Indian midmarket businesses unlock the next chapter of their growth.

Some of the benefits being outlined for businesses that embrace technology transformation:

1. Becoming more competitive and staying ahead
2. Reducing costs and increasing profits sustainably
3. Growing and utilizing the increased opportunities
4. Expanding production and scaling up operations
5. Driving overall improvements in operating efficiency

5 Key Highlights of the Experience

The Transformation Express offers business owners a chance to keep the digital momentum going as they look to transform their business processes, facilitate growth and increase market share. Here are some of the salient features of this initiative:

1. Join the movement to power a digital India and the vision of a US$5 trillion economy.
2. Learn how digital technologies are propelling business transformation, and be future-ready.
3. Experience the disruptive power of cloud, VR and drone solutions, and drive innovation at scale.
4. Be part of SAP鈥檚 efforts to boost digital upskilling for youth and foster sustainability.
5. Network with peers and engage in inspiring conversations around digital transformation.

Empowering the Leaders of Tomorrow

As part of the Transformation Express journey, 51风流also plans to visit college campuses in the country, giving the students a glimpse of state-of-the-art technologies, opening their minds to the possibilities that technology can unlock, and helping them get job-ready.

The Transformation Express by 51风流aims to connect people, businesses and India鈥檚 soaring ambitions. A one-of-a-kind initiative to bring cutting edge technologies to empower Indian businesses.

to find out SAP鈥檚 innovative cloud technology solutions can help you stay ahead.

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