Summit ’07, SAP India’s three-day annual business and technology forum that has brought together over 2,000 delegates including partners, industry experts, media and analysts, kicked off with the felicitation of R Subramanian, managing director of Subhiksha Retail, on account of the company becoming its 1,000th SME (small & medium enterprise) customer in the country during the last one year. Subramanian acknowledged the role of technology in enabling the fast-paced growth of his food & grocery retail chain across the major cities in India.
Subhiksha has ambitious plans of increasing its presence from the present 750 stores to 1,500 stores across the country over the next 12 months. “At Subhiksha we provide our customers with the best prices, and ensuring that we have the right merchandise in the right quantity means that we need to have an IT backbone that enables us to exercise greater control over the process and also provide full visibility of information across the business for efficient decision making. SAP has strong integration capabilities, scalability and rich retail-specific features, especially the flexibility of integrating with our other applications,” said Subramanian.
Speaking at the inaugural session, Alan Sedghi, president & CEO, SAP, Indian Subcontinent, said opportunities for Indian businesses today are boundless – both globally and domestically. SAP India is now focusing on e-governance solutions that integrate all business segments and categories: “Our focus now is on Indianised modules, especially in the SME segment, but we also understand that small will soon grow into large, and large will aspire to become corporate entities,” he added.
“Indian businesses, especially the SMEs, are growing at incredible rates year after year, and to keep pace we have earmarked an additional investment of $1 billion in India by 2010,” said Geraldine McBride, president & CEO, SAP, Asia Pacific, Japan. SAP India has enlisted more than 1,800 customers, of which 1,000 are SMEs, and its solutions cover 54 per cent of the ERP domain, 24 per cent in CRM, and over 30 per cent in SMEs, she said.
“All Indian businesses are expanding vertically and at the same time diversifying horizontally – our solution, therefore, need to be compatible in the changing environment through all-out integration,” said Jim Hagemann Snabe, SAP executive council member. Worldwide, SAP has more than 38,000 customers in more than 120 countries.
