Founded in 1972, SAP makes enterprise software to manage business operations and customer relations and is especially known for its ERP software.
For Kulmeet Bawa, the recently appointed President & Managing Director, SAP Indian subcontinent, his company is constantly at the centre of technology revolution. He was excited to come back to India and join a firm which is a market leader in enterprise application software and helping organisations fight the damaging effects of complexity, generate new opportunities for innovation and growth, and stay ahead of the competition.
Interestingly, India is clearly among the German multinational software corporation’s fastest growing market, wherein it caters to nearly 12,000 customers from diverse industries.
While having an e-chat with Dr. Annurag Batra, Editor-in-chief of BW Businessworld, Bawa affirmed, “As a nation and a geography I have always been attracted for the headroom in India to expand our operations with the kind of demographic dividend, millennial population, etc, that we have. When I look at the whole value proposition and that is what attracted me into the company.” He was talking during one of the episodes of BW Dialogue.
He further added, “In India, we have more than 11,700 customers and more than 80% are Small and Medium Business customers. We have launched the ‘Global Bharat programme’ for SMEs in order to enable them to be globally competitive.
We want to equip them with digital technologies and have adopted three big initiatives such as:
- How to provide them access to global marketplaces
- How do we digitally scale workforces and;
- How do we help them digitally transform businesses.
Founded in 1972, SAP makes enterprise software to manage business operations and customer relations and is especially known for its ERP software. The company is headquartered in Walldorf, Baden-Württemberg, Germany with regional offices in 180 countries. The company has over 425,000 customers in over 180 countries and is a component of the Euro Stoxx 50 stock market index.
“It is very clear to me that customers (in India) are turning to SAP, intelligent enterprise to drive resilience, profitability and sustainability. We saw a huge demand for solutions that increase, what I call, resiliency. We saw a relevancy in our portfolio when it comes to commerce solutions, which I call a ‘blowout quarter’ in my parlance. We are doing stuff related to digital supply chain management also. We saw a lot of upside in those areas, even as we transcended the first few months of quarter,” Bawa further added.
When queried about its global R&D centre in Bangalore, he maintained that the lab in India is SAP’s largest outside Germany.
“We have (a total workforce of) about 13,500 of SAP sitting here In India and have a handful of engineers who work for SAP globally. It is the second largest establishment outside Europe. We are touching upon some of the amazing technologies and there are a lot of patents that come out of India. A lot of groundbreaking innovations happen within the Indian centre for our global markets. A whole lot of that leads to job creation in the country or touching of the innovation. The passion with which we are trying to grow the India business especially in times like Covid whether in terms of CSR, technology, innovation, is extraordinary,” stated Bawa.
It is interesting to note that Bawa was the Chief Operating Officer for Resulticks where he led the growth strategy and execution of go-to-market for the organization and was operating from Singapore. With cross functional experience of more than 25 years, he has served with the Indian Army in the Armored Corps, subsequently moving to the corporate side. He led the India & South Asia market for Adobe orchestrating businesses to digitally transform and drive excellence in customer experience, prior to that he was with Microsoft Corporation and Sun Microsystems, managing enterprise strategies across industries and portfolios.