‘Only our India hub has SAP’S full product portfolio’
SAP Labs India’s managing director and senior vice-president, SINDHU GANGADHARAN, has been with the company for 22 years. Her tenure at SAP Labs, which will complete 25 years in India next year, is a lesson in how companies engage with employees. In an interview with Shivani Shinde, she talks about the importance of SAP Labs’ India hub and its tech offerings. Edited excerpts:
Twenty-two years with one company is a long time. What binds you to SAP?
SAP is a very purpose-driven company, which also means that if we are offering something to clients, we would have already implemented it at SAP. We’ve been able to attract some of the best talent in the industry, because we are solving some of the world’s most complex business problems.
For me, SAP opened the world. For instance, when I was asked to drive the intelligent enterprise strategy at
SAP, it meant working across our different lines of business. Each is a world of its own. The learning opportunities, our purpose-driven culture, phenomenal employee benefits, and the platform for driving that innovation mindset — these factors are what keeps somebody like me, or anybody who had long careers, at SAP.
Are these kinds of opportunities becoming fewer, in light of attrition and moonlighting?
I can talk about the product and research field. When you are building products over a sustained period of time, you are also involved in how a product gets built, designing it with the best customer experience, looking at commercialisation models, and at what business models can be applied. I think you have to keep employees challenged from an IQ point of view and give them opportunities to have fun.
It’s about innovation. A decade or so back, employees did not ask these questions, but now they want to know how their journey will pan out. What’s my learning curve? How do I give back to society? How do I contribute to the country that I’m part of ? It’s a different kind of conversation. And maybe it’s also because there’s a multitude of opportunities.
Your take on moonlighting?
It is clearly mentioned in the contract that one cannot have a second job. If someone wants to open a bakery, we are fine. Or, if a team manager is OK with what that person is doing, it’s OK. But it cannot be voluntary. With moonlighting talked about so much, we have also become vocal about the issue within the company, especially for employees who have joined us in the last two years.
We have been adding on average 2,500-3,000 new hires every year, and even this year it’s the same. We are making conscious efforts to sensitise these people. These folks who joined SAP this time are
With SAP Labs India set to complete 25 years, what do the next few years look like?
Today SAP Labs India is the largest R&D hub for SAP, and it will continue to be so. That’s a clear commitment from SAP. SAP Labs has 20 labs across 18 countries, and five hubs across the US, Germany, China, Canada and India. Of these hubs, only the India hub has the entire breadth of SAP’S product portfolio. The core research that’s happening for the key parts of our portfolio — business network, intelligence spend, or procurement and sourcing — is all happening in India.
New parts of the portfolio like enterprise cloud for sustainability products are also being built here. We are rebuilding our second campus, which is also in Bengaluru. Almost 87 per cent of the world’s business transactions run on SAP systems, as the company caters to over a half a million customers worldwide.
A shift is also happening. Earlier, we looked at customers predominantly in Europe and the US, but now all of them are coming to India, and setting up centres of excellence here. This means, for SAP’S continued growth in India, we will focus on innovation across our portfolio — and continued growth in talent as well.
What will SAP Labs’ key focus areas in India be over the next few years?
A big part of the business technology platform is focus on key areas like the artificial intelligence foundation, our composable business processes, and sustainability. The government has mandated that the top 1,000 listed firms need to have their business responsibility and sustainability reporting in place by 2023. For a product company like ours, it becomes our responsibility to make sure that we have a common standard. That is one of the biggest research efforts happening in Europe. Quantum is another area that we are working on.