SAP Labs in Bangalore has the largest development facility outside Germany and rates India among the top eight strategic markets.
On his first visit to India, Shai Agassi, president of the product and technology group and member of executive board, SAP AG, announced the hiring of 2,000 more people and said the additional staff would be from India and not "at the expense of other places".
Presently, SAP's Bangalore facility, among the four global development hubs, accounts for 20 per cent of the company's 10,000 developers globally, he said.
Agassi also announced the opening of SAP's first NetWeaver Centre of Excellence at SAP Labs campus in Bangalore.
The centre would facilitate the process of educating SAP partners in India and Asia-Pacific on the SAP NetWeaver platform to enable faster adoption of Enterprise Services Architecture, he said.
SAP NetWeaver is an open integration and application platform and technical enabler of ESA, which is a blueprint for implementing enterprise-scale business solutions and flexible IT infrastructures by leveraging Web services and other open standards, company officials said.
SAP has invested Euro 20 million to build Phases 1 and II of the India development centre and already announced it would invest Euro 20 million more for Phase III of the SAP Lab Campus. Rajesh Agarwal would head the centre of excellence.
"The SAP Labs India team is one of our most important development teams for SAP NetWeaver worldwide and is driving innovation and development in diverse areas such as ESA, Application Platform, xApps, Business Intelligence, Exchange Infrastructure and Knowledge management and collaboration," Agassi said.
Responding to a query, he said the Indian version of SAP Business One, a solution for small businesses, would be launched by the end of this year.
More than 27,000 customers in 120 countries run more than 91,500 installations of SAP software, the company said.