Bill McDermott, SAP president and CEO (Americas and APJ), is credited with re-energising SAP America when he joined the company in 2002. Since then, the US division under him has delivered 22 consecutive quarters of significant market share growth even as McDermott has risen through the ranks to take on the responsibility for all regions worldwide as an executive board member of SAP AG.
McDermott was in Mumbai recently to attend the SAP Summit 2008, SAP India's three-day annual business and technology forum. In a conversation with
Aanand Pandey, McDermott discussed India's role in SAP's global market strategy. He also spoke about the attributes that have helped him drive the company through the expansion phase. Edited excerpts:
Where does India fit into your company's strategy?India is the fastest-growing market in the world for SAP. We are looking at it as a centre of innovation and co-creation of value for our clients. The real interest in India is to find the next practice. To find the unexplored innovative idea - one that can change the game. We plan to use India as an incubation engine of innovation for our entire company.
Can you give us examples of innovations being developed here?We started the outsourcing of value engineering to India a few years ago. The idea was to analyse the business functions of companies operating in 24 distinct industries, come up with a performance matrix and inculcate that analysis into everything that we do, not only in the US, but in Europe and Latin America as well. We used the intellect and the superior talent that we had in India to help us scale this company.
Another example of an innovative idea taking shape here is the "partner ecosystem". There are big Indian companies such as Satyam, HCL, Wipro and the Tata group that have standardised their business processes on SAP.
We are building composite applications on the top of their or their partners' existing SAP platforms. We are doing it when they want to change, for instance, their channel strategy or extend their supply chain. We are co-creating value with them as a trusted advisor.
Even if it means deploying Microsoft's or Oracle's application tools?We are not in a technology war. We are in co-creating value for customers. We are working with Microsoft in enabling value creation with Duet, a program that combines Microsoft office applications with SAP enterprise applications. I got a call this morning from a client in India who wanted Adobe Interactive Forms to be embedded into his SAP applications. These co-innovations are good for the customers and it's good for us, because the platform holding these applications together is SAP.
You are credited with introducing the European long-term view of the market to SAP and combining it with the American market-driven strategy. Consequently, SAP applies the integrated European-American best practices to all its markets. This makes Indian IT professionals working locally feel distanced from major policy decisions taken at SAP headquarters. Comment.