After the launch of the SAP's new cloud offering called S/4 HANA, powered by machine learning and Artificial Intelligence, in India, the company is looking forward to expanding its cloud services across Indian industries. Recently, the leading ERP services provider company conducted its annual Partner Summit in India in order to grow its cloud portfolio and recruited some of the partners. Most of the new partners are not familiar with SAP SuccessFactors or Customer Engagement and commerce - which are SAP Hybris suite or SAP Ariba.  

"There are some elements around it, such as the intelligent ERP which looks at new and transformational ways of interacting with our ERP system," said Anthony McMahon, Senior Vice President, General Business (SME) & Channels, SAP Asia Pacific Japan. There's an overall improvement, not just the UI, but also the ability to engage with voice assisted SAP Copilot. It also offers the benefits of running dynamic business processes on HANA, which you get as a benefit of having the in-memory system where you can run both the transactional and analytical database all in one. And then integrating it to a broader intelligent suite, which is either connected to our cloud solutions or partners developing their own IP on the SAP Cloud Platform that could be industry based extensions, or it could be a functional enhancement, or it could even be the SAP Leonardo portfolio, he added.  

Due to the multiplicity of industry in India, a large percentage of GDP comes from the SMB space.  The company is trying to take this opportunity to deliver a positive outcome in the industries by forming enough partners with industry knowledge and consultants. To implement it, SAP is working with its partner ecosystem and government agencies to skill, re-skill and up-skill 1.5 million SAP consultants. The company also expected that India will be named among the top cloud markets globally by 2020, with a USD 4.1 billion market opportunity.

The company has launched an initiative called ‘i360' around working with technical colleges and universities. The initiative is taken to enable and set up a lab where SAP can demonstrate some of the leading technologies on the SAP Leonardo platform. They will be covering Technologies like AI, Blockchain, Machine learning and cloud analytics.

The SAP is already familiar with the markets where cloud consumption or cloud adoption is the primary way to utilize its technology. In markets like Australia and New Zealand in terms of both larger enterprises and SMBs, the ACV (Annual Contract Value) of SAP's cloud offering has overtaken the on-premise business.  According to SAP, a larger installed based customer that runs on-premise ERP might move to the hybrid model where it might start with a private managed cloud by re-hosting its on-premise applications onto an SAP managed the cloud with the HANA Enterprise Cloud.