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With over 8,000 attendees consisting of partners, customers, consultants, industry analysts, bloggers, media, and SAP officials from across the world, Sapphire, the annual conference of SAP is no doubt becoming a major annual conglomeration of business users.

Therefore, there could not have been a better place than Vienna, the beautiful city by the river Danube, to drive home the message that SAP is not just about ERP modules, but is now helping companies with business transformation.

While the entire show was through and through a hard-sell of various SAP technologies, solutions, and upgrades in the pipeline, one message that came across loud and clear was that amid increasing competition in this space, companies like SAP will drastically enhance their customer engagement spectrum. In his opening keynote, Henning Kagerman, chairman and CEO of SAP said, "Our big focus will be to give a big boost to the competitiveness of our customers".

While all this is good news for SAP and its customers, there are also challenges. The impact of globalization for instance is being felt on this Walldorf, Gefrmany-based company. There are reports of internal tussle between its supposedly conservative European leadership that was comfortable with the state of affairs, and the more ambitious US and emerging markets where most of the current growth in terms people and markets is happening. Even on some prestigious stock exchanges, SAP's show was dull compared to its rival Oracle.

It is but natural that SAP wants its role in an organization far beyond just ERP now, and working on all fronts towards that objective. "Roll out of new products, mergers and aqcuisitions, and building specialization areas in this direction, is the right step," explained a New York-based analyst attending the mega conference.

One interesting observation was in one of the slides that chief Kagerman presented in his opening address, according to which a large part of SAP's big customers are still undecided on the future course of their platform of preference. It is, therefore, the right time for this company to take steps and make announcements that will reassure customers. For instance, there was a lot of stress on concepts such as measuring corporate performance and ensuring corporate governance, risk management, and compliance. SAP is pitching for a role in all these processes, which are now gaining criticality as business and their markets become global.

In fact, SAP also announced that its customers the world over were responding very positively to its All-in-One solutions, with over 10,000 customers in more than 50 countries benefiting from it. The company also announced a new business opportunity for its partners and customers. This initiative is based on co-innovation as a community collaboration model, specially for banking and insurance applications. Kagerman was also open about his support for the need for collaboration when he said, "Individual and team collaboration in enterprises is going to be very important, especially if IT has to be fully leveraged."

In the middle of all this, the company says it will be focusing on large, medium, and some small customers only. And in their small customers, very small customers do not have any place. At least in the near term. But considering that the small customer is the biggest opportunity in the pipeline, specially in markets like India, the company is not ruling them out. According to Leo Apothekar, President, Customer Solutions and Operations, at SAP "We will not go after SOHO type of customers. But in the future we might consider it."

The mood at Sapphire was clearly very upbeat, as delegates queued up at the registration desks. The three large exhibition halls where SAP partners, including Indian players such as TCS. Wipro, HCL and Genpact were displaying products and services, were crowded with visitors.

The company also took this big opportunity to make some major announcements, the biggest of which was SAP's tie-up with an old competitor SunGard, a $4 bn software solutions company for the financial services sector. In another significant move, SAP announced that it has acquired Wicom, a leading European IP-based solutions company that focuses on contact centers and enterprise communications solutions. These moves are expected to further consolidate SAP's position in the BFSI and BPO space.

That this company is not just about business and corporate applications was made amply clear when Apotheker announced that the beautiful city of Vienna has chosen SAP for making the life of its residents simple and efficient. The Vienna City Administration will now run its network, which is one of the largest in Europe, connecting 30,000 employees with 1.7 mn residents, on the SAP platform. The company is very aggressively going after some of the key e-Governance projects in India, an area that is in the take-off mode now.

Talking of India, SAP has some big client names to flash. Firms across a spectrum of industries such as Titan, Bajaj Auto, Mahindra & Mahindra, Indian Oil, ITC-IBP, Apollo Tyres, Reliance Energy, Sundram Clayton, Bharat Petroleum, and ONGC are some of the customers in the large enterprise category that have really been able to leverage SAP technology towards meeting their business objectives. The company now talks of these success stories at global conferences.

No wonder that for India, SAP has big plans. The company has already committed an investment of $1 billon for India operation in the coming few years. In addition it also plans to double the employee headcount by the year 2010. Further, e-learning facilities will be provided in tier-II cities across the country, for which plans are in the pipeline. By 2010 SAP expects to impart training to 1,50,000 people as SAP consultants.

Clearly SAP's gameplan is big, long term, and sort of all encompassing. According to Doug Merrit, executive VP, Business User Development, and Corporate Officer at SAP, "Today large companies have on one hand global interests and on the other are being forced into compliance regarding corporate governance and risk. Their smaller partners down the line are also being forced to adopt these practices. Business transformation has to happen and SAP is proving to be a big enabler for that".

Ibrahim Ahmad
The author was hosted in Vienna

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