‘India poised to become largest public sector market in APAC region’

Could you walk us through some recent developments at SAP?

SAP’s finance and spend management portfolio used to be called the Intelligent Spend and Business Network. This year, the portfolio has increased to include finance, spend management, and the growth pillar — the public cloud offering. 

SAP is looking at going after personas. SAP Business Network has grown exponentially. For context, it is approximately, equal to India and Australia’s GDP combined. That’s the amount of commerce we do.

The Indian supplier base is growing on the SAP business network; they are also supplying to companies outside India.  

If you look at it from a CIO standpoint, they are very interested in making sense out of data. We’ve been continuously saying that data is gold, but we need to make sense of data, especially in an enterprise.

To make sense of this data, we need an enterprise system to consolidate data from an SAP or non-SAP system or even homegrown systems like Tally. We recently introduced SAP Business Data Cloud (BDC), a partnership we announced with Databricks, a cloud-based data and analytics platform that integrates SAP data with third-party data to provide a single source of truth for businesses. It leverages AI and ML to deliver insights and facilitate better decision-making.

A Chief digital officer would want automation included and that’s where SAP’s AI co-pilot, Joule comes in. We have an agentic AI layer on top. For example, a CIO asks Joule about the usage of an Ariba portfolio or a SuccessFactors portfolio on the number of users. Joule will get into the system, get this data out, and present it to you.

From a CFO standpoint, the CEO might ask to free some cash flow. SAP’s product Taulia, is a recent acquisition in supply chain finance. That’s where a combination of CFO and CPO will come in. That’s the objective. So in essence, we are doing a load of innovation for every persona in an organisation.

What business segments does SAP address? Do you also look at MSMEs and the public sector? 

We have a variety of customers, including unicorns and soonicorns. MSMEs are trying to do their part. We also announced the data centre for India for procurement specifically last year, which is already live now. This will boost the public sector as well. From my portfolio perspective, I cut across India, Sri Lanka, Bangladesh, and across every industry and customer size. 

The public sector will be one of the largest in terms of revenue generation for SAP because we are doing a lot of localisation. We are coming up with our second campus now, from where this localisation effort will be led. 

How does India’s public sector business differ from other countries? 

India’s public sector is probably the most vibrant compared to any other place. The pace can be slow at times because of stringent processes but, they are doing far more innovative work than anybody else.  

In Asia, for example, Japan is still a little old school. They still do the Ringi process on an A3 sheet. The US has always been mature; even the White House uses SAP.  

From a growth perspective, India is far ahead. Look at the railways’ modernisation and the infrastructure being built. Every other customer in the public sector, whether they are in utilities, energy, infra, or defence, is talking about modernisation.  

For instance, one customer in the petroleum and energy sector is looking at procurement transformation in a big way. They are saying they want to adhere to how the public sector is looking at being reliant, compliant, and audited because it is answerable to the country’s public. They are asking for technology to help bridge the gap. 

The public sector is looking outstanding. It will be huge. We are also talking about getting a sovereign data cloud in the country. India is also on the path to becoming the biggest market from a public sector standpoint in the APAC region.

Can you specify some use cases?

A majority of the work is happening across IT. CIOs are keeping busy and are looking to modernise their complete IT setup.

A lot of work will happen across procurement because that’s a space under auditors’ scrutiny. After all, money is involved. In most of these cases, a customer would request a tender before purchasing anything above a particular value. They would return to say, they want to modernise IT, but it will be via a tender process.  

They are also looking at employee experience. For example, when someone travels, we have to look at how the expenses are booked into the system, or if the system is booking my expense into the system.

On the other hand, the hire-to-retire exercise is happening via SAP SuccessFactors. That is another space where they’re looking at employee well-being — from a person getting into the system and somebody leaving the company — about their experience working there. That area is picking up a lot of steam.  

We are also looking at the supply chain, which is a vibrant topic in 2025. There is a lot of excitement in the air. People talked about offshoring 20 years ago and nearshoring after COVID-19 to have their suppliers close to them. Now, we are talking about re-shoring because we need to see how the world order changes in terms of how the US, China, or India look at things, how the supplier base is based, and how much tax or tariff will be on top.