SAP’s global head for customer success Scott Russell said the company was looking at how businesses would start doing things differently as they emerge from the pandemic and how it could help them transform faster.
“Our customers’ stories have revolved around the imperative of digital transformation to help build resilience, agility, and profitability during the past year. We have answered by engaging in a new way that helps them acquire and derive value from our solutions faster and build on these critical traits,” said Russell, who is an executive board member of SAP customer success. “Our customers’… want to digitally transform in a full-cloud future.”
The company recently announced that it would be investing Rs 500 crore in India to accelerate its multi-cloud strategy in the country and make multiple cloud solutions available in its India data centres to better serve local customers.
“This investment will help customers in India do just that,” he said. “Our recent commitment to invest in India is centred around delivering transformation in the cloud…This will help Indian enterprises gain greater flexibility, respond to local market requirements and harness the power of their data faster.”
A large segment of SAP’s customer base in India is what it calls the mid-market segment. “Mid-market businesses will continue to remain the growth engine of the Indian economy,” said Russell. “We… support mid-market customers in embracing digitization, focusing on upskilling their workforce and enhancing their overall business value.”
Of about 12,000 customers in India, over 9,500 fall into this segment. The company has been undertaking various programmes in collaboration with the government authorities to target this segment, which Russell said it would continue to focus on. Last year, it had launched the Global Bharat Movement, an India-focused programme designed to equip Indian SMEs with digital technologies in order to make them globally competitive.
“We are definitely seeing a new scale and depth in cloud adoption—entire industries and even economies are making the move. Although tens of thousands of organizations have already moved significant portions of their workloads to the cloud with SAP during the past decade, the transition of our global economy to the cloud will accelerate this year. India is definitely no exception,” he said.
Russell, who was earlier president for the Asia Pacific Japan region, moved into his new role in January. Customers, he said, are clear about their intent to transform digitally. In order to do that, SAP has been accelerating its investments in cloud capability across the company.
“We announced more research and development, greater co-innovation, and better integration, as well as improved security, reliability, and availability across all of our solutions,” he said. Alongside, the company is changing how it engages with its customers. SAP has brought all the customer-facing teams under a single mandate and board area of customer success. As a result, the customer engagements have become more streamlined, said Russell.
(Except for the headline, this story has not been edited by The Technology Express staff and is published from a syndicated feed)
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