Software giant SAP says India is fastest growing market for company, cloud customers doubled in last 2 years

The 50-year old German enterprise software giant SAP, that probably works with nearly every company we interact with, right from the toothbrush to milk, smartphones to our cars, and much more, says India is one of the fastest growing markets for the company globally. SAP had entered India 27 years ago, and has one of the largest R&D centre in India outside Germany, with over 15,000 people working in five locations.

“It's been an very exciting 25 years for SAP because while the Indian economy has grown about 10x in the last 25 years, today, we end up touching more than 60 per cent of India's GDP, just through SAP and its partner ecosystem. I call it the nation building story for us,” said Kulmeet Bawa, President & MD, SAP Indian Subcontinent

SAP, through its wide range of solutions in the cloud, works with not just large enterprises but with mid-market and start-up ecosystem too in the country. So be it Mahindra, Apollo Tyres or Asian Paints, all of them have now moved to Cloud for SAP’s solutions. The latest to join is Air India. The country’s leading airline recently successfully completed its ERP modernization program and migrated to SAP’s RISE with SAP solution. Air India migrated from an on-premise legacy mainframe system to SAP Cloud, laying a strong foundation for its digital transformation journey, and expects to bring significant improvements in it’s core enterprise functions such as Finance and Human Resources while fast-tracking its ability to roll out advanced capabilities in its Commercial, Operations, and Engineering areas.

“Similarly the MSMEs are growing very quickly. We are working with more than 40 unicorns today in India,” added Bawa. For instance, boAt, the Indian consumer electronics brand founded in 2015, is using RISE With SAP solutions allowing the company to focus on core processes by outsourcing infrastructure management. And eventually, boAt aims to transform into an intelligent enterprise that relies on insights and data.

The company has doubled the cloud customers in India in the last two years alone. While the company does not share country wise breakup, Bawa added, “It's probably one of the fastest and the best case studies or references as far as SAP globally.”

Even the SAP leadership, including CEO Christian Klein, at the company’s annual conference SAPPHIRE 2023 in Orlando told Business Today that India has a huge potential and market to be for SAP. Earlier this year, during the global Q1 earnings announcement, the company stated that SAP's cloud revenue performance was robust across all regions. Brazil, Germany and India had outstanding cloud revenue growth while China, Japan, Mexico, the Netherlands, Switzerland, and the United States performed particularly strong.