Sanket Deodhar, vice president and head of digital natives, SAP India, says 80 percent of their customers in India are small and medium enterprises. Hence for them, reach is very important and marketing strategy is very critical. “Today, there are various ways in which we do that. One, how do we reach the Bharat of India, the tier 2, 3, and 4 cities that we have, and leverage our marketing teams as well as our partner ecosystem to sort of reach those customers, showcase our value, and how we can help them. How our products and services can help them. So, that’s one area of it,” Deodhar says in an interview with Storyboard18.
Edited excerpts.
How does SAP India ensure its brand remains memorable and stands out in the competitive market?
I think we have been doing this for the last 51 years. The SAP brand is synonymous with the largest of the corporations today. It is synonymous with innovation and solving business problems. And I think that is the important piece that we hold together by creating success for our customers, solving their business problems, and continuing on our mission to make the world run better and improve people’s lives.
With that motto, we continue to keep on building on our brand, as well as an important part from a SAP India standpoint, since we completed 25 years of operations last year. A big part is on nation building from an India standpoint.
We have been involved in various projects, involved in supporting the largest SME segment here, and also for the last few years, focusing on building the third largest startup ecosystem and contributing to it in various forms and shapes and engagements that we do. So, I think that is how we continue to build our brand.
And from our perspective, there are three important pillars: Customers, our partners, and our employees. Having clear communication and understanding with all these three important stakeholders has helped us enhance our brand and continue the flow of the brand.
Tell us more about Rise with SAP, its advantages and disadvantages, and how it will disrupt the marketing landscape and help startups.
Rise with SAP has helped us scale up GROW with SAP. It has been there as a flagship program for the last two to three years from an SAP standpoint. It has already disrupted the market. It has already given a path for our customers for faster innovation, improved time to value, and has kept innovation at the core of it while we were solving critical business problems for them.
What we are doing with GROW with SAP is making SAP reachable for startups today. By looking at the various feedbacks we have received over the last three years, and our experience with startups, we have made it far more agile as a product. What we are also doing now is that we are also reducing the time to value. We used to talk about months and months for implementation. We are now talking about weeks here. And that commitment coming from SAP and our partners is essentially here.
We have also built constructs, commercial constructs that help scale-ups and startups to adopt SAP in a much faster and much leaner manner without pinching their wallets much. So, that’s what we are announcing here.
Also, with GROW with SAP for scale-ups, we are ensuring that the programs enable startups to start using our Generative AI and business AI capabilities right from day one. So, that’s a very big advantage that we are bringing to the table.
What are the top trends SAP India is closely watching for potential impact on its products and services in the upcoming fiscal?
From a product and technology standpoint, we are really focusing on what impact we can create with business AI and Generative AI for our customers. That’s a big trend from a technology standpoint that we are all focusing on right now.
Second is how do we continue to make our customers adopt innovation much faster. Whether it’s our low-code, no-code technology through B2B, whether it’s our ability to create applications in a much faster manner on our business technology platform.
So, some of these are movers and shakers from an SAP standpoint. And then continue to understand the market and the needs of the market, and look at programs like Grow with SAP for scale-ups. Last year we launched GROW with RISE, GROW with SAP as a program. So, I think these programs will help us to take SAP to our customers and hopefully solve their business problems or the challenges that they are facing.
How does SAP India plan to allocate its marketing budget effectively to maximise returns on investment and market reach?
I think we have been doing this very effectively for some time now. And India being a huge geography, 80 percent of our customers today are small and medium enterprises in India. So, for us, reach is very important. Our marketing strategy is very critical.
So today, there are various ways in which we do that. One, how do we reach the Bharat of India, the tier 2, 3, and 4 cities that we have, and leverage our marketing teams as well as our partner ecosystem to sort of reach those customers, showcase our value, and how we can help them. How our products and services can help them. So, that’s one area of it.
The second area is largely around focusing on communicating what our product and services strategy can help customers with. How it has helped global enterprises. How it has helped solve their problems. And how those case studies and those references can help them to solve their current problems. So, communicating that well is our marketing strategy. And the reach to Bharat is the second pillar from that perspective.
Could you provide examples of how SAP India applies AI technologies across its solutions to drive innovation and value for customers?
So, this is one of the most comprehensive business AI portfolios that any enterprise applications firm has launched. The big difference that we are bringing to the table is that we are embedding business AI and that’s why we are calling it business AI so that it helps the users when they are doing their day-to-day transactions.
When I say business AI, it doesn’t cut across only one solution per se. We are talking about the business AI cutting across not only our flagship ERP product but across our line of business solutions. It could be the hire-to-retire cycle. It could be the procure-to-pay cycles.
It could be the code-to-cash story for our customers. So, we are affecting each segment or each process creating that business AI impact there. Now, there are various means in which we are doing that and it is a multi-layered strategy that we have built now. When I say multi-layered, we start with Joule, which is the co-pilot that SAP announced.
The co-pilot will help end users get their data at their fingertips with natural language from the query standpoint. So that’s layer one. Layer two largely embeds business AI into each line of business solutions. So, whether it is content generation, AI-powered content generation for our sales cloud, or whether it is a business integrity screening product that can detect fraud, and anomalies within the system. Or for that matter, when it comes to the hire-to-retire cycle, how do I enable smarter resume matching for customers?
So, I think these solutions are coming up in each and every business process aspect that SAP is looking at. That’s why I always say it is the most comprehensive approach for embedding AI in businesses today. And that’s why we are so proud of calling it business AI. Essentially solving business problems with AI.
What are your main focus areas at SAP India this fiscal?
I think this has been an important piece. I think I will put it into maybe two or three pillars around it. First, how do we continue to support our customers, right?
With India becoming such a prominent story, more than 60 percent of the GDP today touches the SAP system. We have a very big responsibility to ensure that our customers are prepared for the volatility that is there in the market today or in the globe today.
How are they better prepared with supply chain resiliency? How are they better prepared to reach the market? How are they better prepared to continue to expand e global expansion, geography expansion that they have?
So I think first and foremost for us the important pillar is how do I make our customers successful, give them a predictable system where they can take their business decisions based on that system? As well as supporting them with the volatility that is there in the market today.
So that’s a very important focus from a strategy standpoint. How do I make my customers successful in this journey? Second piece, with the help of our partners, how do we have the right skill sets available for the market? Because it’s a technology world, it is transitioning very fast. How do we ensure that with our partners we not only enable them but they support our customers together in reaching those goals that we are looking at?
And how do we enable the partner ecosystem so that they are ready for the new advents and new technologies that SAP is bringing, in their products? So I think that has been a very crucial second story from an India standpoint. Third, looking at different opportunities in India, like startups, it is one of the most vibrant startup ecosystems in the world. It is the world’s third largest startup ecosystem. And SAP today with the launch of Grow with SAP for scale-ups, essentially is trying to make SAP reach to the startups who want to grow, who have a great plan to succeed in the future. And SAP can be their partner in that journey.
So identifying those new markets, new initiatives, and new areas will be the third priority from a SAP standpoint.
How big is India as a market for SAP? And the new programs that are being launched, how is it going to help the startups?
India is the third largest startup ecosystem today. But we have customers and unicorns across India. And that has been a big thing. That has been our greatest success story in the startups. That unicorns who believe that they are going to grow, are thinking about getting listed, they are thinking about growing their businesses in multiple geographies, pivoting themselves in different business models are trusting SAP.
So with GROW with SAP for scale-ups, we are now saying that we have seen success with startups. Now we want to bring that success to all the startups and make it affordable for them to sort of go for SAP and build their foundation of processes on SAP.
So I think that largely is the main focus from our perspective where we continue to build on our strengths, build on what we have been doing for enterprises, the Fortune 500s, the Fortune 100s, and see how our experience there can help the startup ecosystem by creating multiple avenues, partnerships, as well as programs so that we can connect with them and SAP becomes part of their journey essentially.
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