DAS: In today’s economic conditions, Indian companies need to ‘think clearly, see clearly, and act clearly’. The ‘clear enterprise’ concept makes SAP even more compelling for customers and resellers. As every enterprise would definitely aspire to be ‘clear’, it will be a good opportunity for our partners to take this message to customers and sell, implement, and enable them to be clear enterprises.
We will be educating and training our partners about how to take this concept to customers. Beside, the ‘clear enterprise’ concept, we would also be offering a compelling RoI to customers both in an economic and environmental perspective.

DAS: I would call it one of the greatest innovations in the software industry in the last 10–15 years. The fact that it is very easy to use and is lightning fast would compel all sorts of businesses to go for it. And it does not involve learning any complex procedures. SAP has taken utmost care in incorporating significant amount of innovation in this product. We are confident that any company that has growing data would be interested in Explorer.

DAS: Smaller companies definitely come up with innovations but that does not mean that bigger companies do not innovate. Besides, we believe that SAP would have an advantage over others because the input data for most of the organizations’ BI systems would essentially come from their own SAP ERP systems. BI market is going to grow in a big way in the coming days.  In fact, this market cannot help but grow. We already have a large base of satisfied customers who are using SAP for automating and optimizing their business processes. From their feedback, what we have not done is to help them make decisions using the data. Explorer, in that way, is a natural extension of our existing offerings.

DAS: Yes. Our resellers will create an awareness about the advantages of SAP. We understand there are millions of such companies, especially in smaller towns in India. These are thriving businesses and require scalable solutions like SAP. Our idea is to reach to every possible customer though we know that is not going to be easy.

DAS: We want our ISV partners to help us in co-innovation. Our reseller partners are also critical. The biggest challenge for us in India is not really the bad economy. It is the fact that we do not have enough trained consultants to implement SAP solutions. So, we need partners who can make our customers happy. It would be impossible for us to reach out to more customers without the help of our resellers. So, partners are important for us in all the three areas — reach, implementation, and co-innovation.

DAS: We want our partners to be part of a high-level innovation to come up with solutions that are customer specific, country specific, industry specific and function specific. In fact, sky is the limit when we say co-innovation. We want our ISV partners to build innovative applications on the SAP platform. It’s a great value proposition for them because they are addressing a large base of 80000 SAP customers.

DAS: Well, that was a decision ‘by design’. It has nothing to do with customer adoption. We wanted to make sure that all aspects are taken care of when we release a new product. Imagine releasing the product for 10,000 people and not being able to support them! We have taken an approach where we have selected few customers and made them use Business ByDesign so that we can find the debugs. Secondly, we want to make sure the TCO equation is right for the customers and SAP. Now we are in the testing stage. India is a huge market but we need to get the cost structure right. We are proving it for the small case and try to scale it up later. We believe that Business ByDesign is going to be a huge business for us about two years down the line.