Exclusive Interview: Parvesh Ghai, VP- Strategic Alliances and Channels, SAP

In an exclusive interaction with DQ Channels, Parvesh Ghai, Vice President -Alliances and Channels Ecosystem, SAP Indian Subcontinent shared the deep information about SAP's new GTM strategies, Channel partner programs and future plans for the Indian market.

What are SAP’s Go-To-Market strategies?

Customers are at the core of SAP’s success and we firmly believe that our partners have an equal hand in this accomplishment. One of our primary goals is to enable partners to ultimately help every customer become a best-run business. It means connecting people and information to address the world’s biggest challenges. That’s why we engineer solutions to fuel innovation, foster equality, and spread opportunity across borders and cultures for our customers to lead in this digital economy.

Our strategy is to deliver an intelligent enterprise to our customers. Over the years we have seen the promising results of best-run businesses adopting intelligent, dynamic, cross-functional processes to deliver optimum experiences. An intelligent enterprise combines machine and human intelligence across all business functions, automating repetitive tasks and business processes and allowing an organization’s workforce to focus on high-value work.

What are the recent developments in the company?

 SAP serves more than 437,000 customers in over 180 countries. Being an enterprise application software company, we have a partnered network with 18,800 SAP partners worldwide and over 600 in India.

We are focused on delivering the Intelligent Enterprise helping customers transform through the adoption of intelligent solutions. With our strong economic fundamentals, improving prospects for faster reforms and growing digitization.

The country, being among the fastest-growing geographies for SAP, will soon notice the intelligent enterprises graduating towards the cloud. Various organizations are now open to considering SAP’s intelligent solutions in newer areas to lead to their digital transformation.

What is your channel strategy?

 With the acceleration of innovation, technological change, and business model disruption, the SAP ecosystem and partners are more important to our success than ever before. Our partners have the power to contribute innovation and create markets for and drive adoption of SAP S/4HANA, SAP Leonardo technologies, and SAP Cloud Platform – enabling SAP to deliver on the promise of the Intelligent Enterprise.

Our partners today have much broader influence in building and innovating technology for SAP customers. We already have seen the importance and impact of the SAP ecosystem and partners grow as our product portfolio significantly expanded through organic development (for example, SAP HANA, SAP Cloud Platform, and SAP S/4HANA)

We work closely with our global strategic service partners, global technology partners, and cloud innovation partners (hyper scalers) to innovate and define innovation road maps so that we can jointly meet our customers’ needs.

What is your existing channel partner program?

SAP's vast network of partners creates an ideal environment for our customer’s growth. Built on a strong foundation of mutual support and collaboration, the Partner Ecosystem provides unparalleled value for customers' every need.

For SAP to continue the momentum of supporting its partner in the market, various programs have been designed to provide partners with the right tools, solutions, and access to SAP software and platforms. This enables them to drive innovation to help customers meet the challenges of the current digital world, where everything is connected to the cloud. We recently created a platform strategy with SAP Cloud Platform and are working with partners to build new innovation and extensions in addition to the core capabilities of Industry 4.0. For eg. some of our customers in the consulting space are building a GST regulatory compliance on SAP Cloud Platform, our customers in the manufacturing sector are building connected products leveraging the SAP Cloud platform.

SAP’s PartnerEdge program framework is the unique foundation to recognize partners for their total business contribution within one or multiple engagement models

Our award-winning partner program with its benefits and enablement resources is designed to:

• Help partners build their business and drive success with offerings that create value and help you gain competitive advantage
• Give them the opportunity to develop and market a comprehensive and growing portfolio of on-premise and cloud solutions
• Complement and enhance their solution and service offerings
• Open new opportunities by enabling them to deliver the best possible value to your customers
• Highlight and enhance their SAP software expertise and differentiate their organization in the market

We also have a Build program under SAP PartnerEdge which offers global and local partners to build innovation-led process extensions to rapidly design, develop, integrate and commercialize their applications under a single, comprehensive partner program.

 With Innovation as a key agenda for customers, our partners will continue to play a strong role in creating new inroads into the market and deliver to customers’ needs.

What are the business expectations and targets that you have to set out to meet in Indian and Market outside India?

 India continues to be one of our primary investment markets where we look forward to building out our capability. As the cloud is set to be a $4Bn market by 2020 in India, the cloud business is growing in the high double digits. The public cloud services revenue in India is likely to reach $2.4 billion in 2019, a 24.3% growth over last year, according to Gartner. There has been a major shift from on-prem to a cloud-based hybrid model.

India is a strategic market in terms of economic growth, we are continuing to invest in the market in order to boost innovation in large research and development centers.

What are SAP’s future plans?

 Cloud spending in India is estimated to grow at 30% p.a. to reach USD 7.1 – 7.2 Bn. in 2022. Recent adoption in computing and a digital ecosystem with better product fit, opportunity in the SME sector and increasing adoption by Start-ups are driving SaaS demand in the domestic market.

In addition to domestic demand, a significant opportunity exists for Indian IT companies to capture global demand in Cloud Computing. Our key focus is on developing the ecosystem including cloud development, connecting start-ups with large system integrators, enabling start-ups on the cloud market places and finally influencing government policies to make them cloud friendly.